Scarlett Johansson’s Tom Waits album is finally out

Being a huge fan of Tom Waits (and this picture of Scarlett’s arse), I’ve been following the story of Scarlett Johansson’s album of Tom Waits covers for a while now. Now finally, it’s out and we get to be all uppity about her destroying our favourite Tom Waits songs.

Except it’s actually quite good.

I think this is mainly because, rather than choosing head-smackingly obvious songs to cover - your Old 55s, your Marthas - she basically skipped all of his earlier, jazzier, easier stuff and went for his slightly more experimental stuff. Two songs off Bone Machine. Two songs off Alice. Swordfishtrombones and Real Gone. Shit, even Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers and Bastards gets a look-in. This is a smart move because these seem to suit her style of singing quite well. The songs she chose are filled with heartbreak and melancholy and she cleverly uses her unique, imperfect voice to emphasise the emotion in the songs. Kind of like the way Nico’s unique, imperfect voice suited the Velvet Underground stuff so well, or the way Melanie Safka used her unique, imperfect voice to knock it out of the park with her cover of Ruby Tuesday. The producers clearly spotted this, and did their best to channel the Velvet Underground or My Bloody Valentine in the production of the album. The tracks are heavily layered, with everything sounding as if it’s been recorded in a hollow stone church twenty miles away from the microphones.

Overall, I actually think it’s quite a nice album, definitely a grower. It’s not quite what you’d expect from a Hollywood starlet doing an album of cover songs. It’s more - and I know this is a dirty word - avant-garde than that. To top it off, her one original song on the album, Song for Jo, is so strong by itself that it makes you wonder why she didn’t do more original stuff. Still, fair play to her for managing to pull it off. The only thing I’d say though is… why did you have to turn I Don’t Wanna Grow Up into a euro-pop song?

Here’s the video of her cover of Falling Down, with David Bowie on backing vocals.