jukebox

Everything Zooey Deschanel seems to be in she makes better.

I have been thinking on this for a couple of days now, after seeing her in the M. Night Shyamalan’s disaster that was nominated for 3 awards, sadly all of them were Razzie’s, but none for Zooey.

Mark Whalberg and M. Night got hammered by the press, but Zooey was at least by my eyes good and maybe because I didn’t pay 10-15$ to see it in the theater it didn’t upset me so much.

I do remember watching it and thinking, Zooey is pretty fantastic. Like the title says and the French say about that thing where you just don’t know what it is that makes it so wonderful.  You call it the “je ne sais quoi”.  For me in my mind going back strictly on her acting career and thinking of the movies I have seen her in: Mumford, The Hitchicker’s Guide to the Galaxy as Trillian that also had Mos Def and how cool would it have been if the two of them composed music, but I digress, an uncredited role in Elf that gave us a glimpse into her singing, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford where most critical reviews once again gave Miss Deschanel the nod her subtle, uplifting and scene stealing ways.  That pretty much sums up the career of a woman who has been in almost 40 feature films seen here “le je ne sais quoi”.

To be honest Zooey isn’t the stand out in a huge crowd, that old school blond beauty with big boobs, but she is quite pretty no mistaking that and her eyes twinkle a grayish – green hue.  She has that girl next door look, but not really the kind I think of when I think America, maybe Dublin or London? Something about the eyes I guess.  She is the rare talent who can have a cult following (and she does), an almost indie rocker actress, much the way Parker Posey did in the 90’s.  You always seem to find yourself rooting for her, like a female John Cusack without all the whining.  She strikes me as maybe the next Meg Ryan, that is a bold statement, but one that seems about right, right now.  Only Meg didn’t fiddle around with the Ukulele from what I know?

Zooey’s voice is often upbeat, cheerful, but also can be pensive and has a sense of feeling beyond that simple yes or no when she wants it.  She acts, well and does the subtle maneuverings that some actresses have and other well, you know.

She is the kind of girl who seems to have all three, Smart, Pretty or Honest. You aren’t supposed to find that in a person according to the post Freudian – Jungian analysis that says a girl is two out of the three: Smart, Pretty or Honest. Some would say that Smart girls marry for money. I still haven’t figured women out and clearly neither have the “experts”.

So again what is it that “quoi” or what that Zooey has? We know she is an actress, and our perceptions can fool us because that isn’t the real Zooey, or is it?  That is what is so interesting about her performing music.  Hollywood has set her up nicely for a long and productive career as that “I don’t know what” girl that you can read all about in that Psychology Today article on what that supposedly means.

Zooey is the Generation X reminder of those John Hughes (this great article in the Washington Post), the St. Elmo’s Fire girls we all grew to love, whose passing last week makes this all the more relevant.  She is the Sarah Hepola, Allison Reynolds (Ally Sheedy), “The Breakfast Club”, Kate Harding: Watts (Mary Stuart Masterson), “Some Kind of Wonderful” ~ Sloane Peterson: “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off”.

Generation Y and Millenials, she is your indie rocker, a little bit off kilter dream girl.  She is what you will chase in your own lives futile and full of love the way the generations before and the generations after do.  I cannot honestly say I too have a tiny crush on the only decent thing in on of the worst movies (The Happening) in a while.

So when Zooey said she was embarking on a music career I don’t think anyone was totally surprised.  She did receive positive reviews for her singing performance in “Elf”.  And why not, her following goes beyond the commercials, beyond the smash blockbusters or the indie films, she has now with this band achieved “cult status” and I am for one am happy for her.  What is I think so loved is not only does she sing and song-write well, she comes across in concert, baring all, her soul much how the perception of her is by boys like me.

When interviewed by Esquire on July 17, 2009, they asked her what can she play and her response was, “Piano and guitar. I can kind of play a little bit of ukulele and pedal steel guitar.”

She clearly has talent, the kind that when this album came out, two things were being asked.

• One was “I knew she was cute, a bit of a singer, rumors that she could play an instrument or two, but like so many actresses, was she an actress who is in a band or a band who is in an actress?”  The answer is she to both.  Zooey is a rare dichotomy, who reminds me a bit of Milla Jovovich with her dedication to the Ukulele that I saw her play among other instruments in concert back in 1995 and you can still see the resemblance musically here.

Zooey’s ability to venture off into a variety of entertainment categories and pull them off with their own merit, what the Hollywood folk call “depth” is also intriguing.  What we are trying to say is, she isn’t an actress who is a musician, she is in fact an actress and she in fact a musician, both able to stand on their own, do what they want to do.  That is so rare in LA where a lot of actors and actresses play night clubs, performing very mediocre and people show up to see this famous person and maybe watch them have psychotic break or something.  I once saw Dennis Quaid play at chic club on Sunset, how we got in was the usual, lying, bribing and moving quickly when the rope opened.  Dennis was OK, for a mediocre, very drunk, lots of Skynard and Willie Nelson tunes (he played “Whiskey River” 3x in a row). It was watching him, as news had just broke that Meg Ryan who he had recently split from was doing “bad” things with Russell Crowe (who we will get to later).  This type of drunken fiasco, made me empathize with the guy, not admire his music, but admire the fact he drunk dialed what appeared to be Meg Ryan at like 2am on a Saturday night.  That is what most “actors” are like as musicians and far worse.

Do not confuse yourself, Zooey Deschanel is nothing like any of them.

• The second question was “The band is named She and Him, but who the heck is him?  Who is this M. Ward character anyhow?”  After we just did a review on the band Eels where the front man Mark Oliver Everett is simply known as E, could this be another example of an ultra talented musician who with the help of a little Hollywood buzz, finally gets noticed?

The answer seems to be yes to the buzz.  As for M. (Matt) Ward he is part of this wonderfully surprising duet of  She and Him coming from to us from Portland, Oregon to bring us their album “Volume One”.  He plays Keys, Guitar, Slide Guitar, Vocals, String Arrangement.  M does far more than just play sidekick to Zooey and I highly recommend that you check out his website and his myspace page for more info on M and his clear talent.  He has worked with Beth Orton, Neko Case and others besides Zooey.

Zooey Deschanel opened designer Erin Fetherston’s show by singing “Dream a Little Dream of Me” ~ Spring 2007

“Volume One” is the first album by She and Him, a collaboration between M. Ward and actress Zooey Deschanel. It was released by Merge Records on March 18, 2008.

The album debuted at #81 on the Billboard Charts in its first week, and climbed to #71 in its second week. It has received a strong response from critics, receiving a score of 76/100 on MetaCritic, indicating overall positive reviews. It was also voted the #1 Album of 2008 by Paste Magazine.

To put this in perspective Paste Magazine is a publication that we at Riddled Phantasms Magazine think VERY highly of and tout it as one of the best if not THE BEST music magazine on the web.  The fact that they are located right down the road from our central headquarters in Atlanta (with correspondents in LA, DC, Phoenix and Dublin), we found this fact out about their location after we had already become enamored with the site itself.

There is a music video for “Why Do You Let Me Stay Here?”.

The song was number 64 on Rolling Stone’s list of the 100 Best Songs of 2008.

So what does this all mean?  We have given you lots of stats and links and photos and videos and talked about the music and why they are so likable, but again we are left with the “je ne sais quoi”.  Well I will tell you “quoi” or why.  She starts off the album much the way the entire album flows, a throwback to the old jukebox machines at the bowling alley.  For me my Grandfather owned an Alley in NJ and so I am familiar with this type of getting music played – seeing the actual record get lifted up slowly and placed on the turn table for playing.

First I would direct you to their website and myspace page as those tend to have the freshest updates for music, videos and tour info.

The first track, “Sentimental Heart” is just that. It is what I guess you would call old school, but not in a Nike old Jordan’s sort of way, but rather way before that like mentioned above, taken from a time machine and written and sung with an effervescent grace and heart fog romance found on an off shoot jukebox.  The song is about heartbreak and it doesn’t use nifty vague references about the earth shattering overly dramatic crap that you get in a lot of songs.

It is pop, it is folk, it is genuine where you wallow, no need for mellow dramatic hyperbole about suicide or a lot of the trumped up stuff on love. Love can be the best thing ever, Zooey clearly gets that, but like greatness, the higher you are the longer and more impacting the fall.

Track 1~ Sentimental Heart ~ She and Him

“Cried all night till there was nothin’ more
What use am I as a heap on the floor?
Heaving devotion but it’s just no good
Takin’ it hard just like you knew I would

CHOUS
Oh, oh, old habits die hard
When you got, when you got a sentimental heart…”

On track 7 of the album Zooey and M decide covers Smokey Robinson’s “You Really Got A Hold On Me” is hauntingly good. It is true and was a top 10 single when released by the Miracles in 1962 and is covered by many, is a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Inductee.  In talking about her covers which include:

Track #8 ~ “You Really Got a Hold on Me“ (Smokey Robinson) – 3:59

Track #11 ~  “I Should Have Known Better” (Lennon/McCartney) – 3:39

These covers as Zooey says about them, on Pitchfork,

Pitchfork: Did this understanding of history influence your decision to include a selection of cover songs on the album?

Zooey Deshchanel: We had both recorded “I Should Have Known Better” as demos. That was a sort of weird and exciting thing, so we decided to do that as a duet. There’s a version of that song onBeach Boys’ Party! that I really like because– and I really love the Beatles version as well, of course– it’s nice to hear a cover that has so much life and is so much fun and so different from the original. It really expressed a different side of the song. I thought here was a song that had many different sides, and we tried to find another one.

The Smokey Robinson song has been covered so many times that it’s now almost a standard. We were sort of playing around with it in the studio and then just decided to put it down. I liked that it really had the feeling of that moment in the studio. We recorded it in one take and there were no overdubs. That’s one of the most exciting things for me about listening to records: It’s a moment in time, and the less it’s messed with the more powerful it is. I wanted at least one song on the record to be just completely about the moment.

Track # 8 ~  ‘You Really Got a Hold on Me’ – She and Him

I don’t like you, but I love you
Seems I’m always, thinking of you
Oh, oh, oh, you treat me badly
I love you madly
You really got a hold on
You really got a hold on…

One thing you will notice is how the album starts with a crushed heart, a crushed hope. The first song she lays it out there, speaking of crying till there was nothing else left to do.

Cried all night till there was nothin’ more
What use am I as a heap on the floor?
Heaving devotion but it’s just no good
Takin’ it hard just like you knew I wouldCHORUS
Oh, oh, old habits die hard
When you got, when you got a sentimental heart

Hope is as important as anything in the world, without we suffer immense pain. “Hope springs eternal youth,” said Alexander Pope a couple hundred years ago Zooey and M get right into it with the first song and keep on delving into that subject and how to work around it.  “Time takes care of the wounds, so that I can believe,” said Jeff Buckley.  With this album you will see that time, reflection, longing and hurt doesn’t go away because Dr. Phil says so or because your friends say “forget about her” or “forget about him”.  It is a process and for each of us it is different.  This album explores that as well as any you will find.

Here are a couple of more tracks to give you a taste of the album, plus a very rare version of “Swing Low Sweet Chariot” is an old slave song, a hymn actually, that finally got recorded by the Library of Congress in 1909.

Again when asked in the pitchfork interview, one that I highly recommend along with the Paste Magazine articles if you are truly interested for more, is this snippet about this particular song:

Pitchfork: What about “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot”, a song that doesn’t seem able to perform such a task? Why include a song that already has such a long and complex history of its own?

…The beginning of the record starts off with “Sentimental Heart”– it’s sort of meant to begin very humbly– it’s very spare. Then it goes into the bigger arrangements and sounds that mark the rest of the song.

In a way, that song was meant to be an introduction to the whole world of the record. And the “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” was meant to bring you back to that initial feeling. To me, it begins in my bedroom and then you are introduced to this different world of the record, and then you are taken back out with this little song at the end.

This track is listed as untitled on the disc and not all versions sold for reasons I do not fully know.  I cannot find where I saw that, so maybe it isn’t true, but if you do decide to buy the disc I would make sure it has the song.

Enjoy these additional tracks, bringing the total to 5 and 2 videos, we hope that is a start to get you excited about an album that is over a year old, but possibly new to many out there who thought “Zooey Deschanel is making  a record, pfft, more of that Jeff Goldblum, Billy Bob Thornton (who I saw in concert and it was awful), Eddie Murphy to name a few. As bad as those were, this is like bizarro Russell Crowe’s band (for you Superman followers), meaning it IS good.  So I’ve rambled enough again, hopefully you were able to make it through some if not all and take the time to hear all this great music and download the free tracks from RPMusic here.
Track 4 ~  Change is Hard ~ She and Him
Track 12 ~ ‘Sweet Darlin’ ~ She and Him
Track untitled (Swing Low Sweet Chariot) ~ She and Him

[click to continue…]

Tagged as: actress, heartfelt, indie-star, jukebox, M-Ward, movie, She-and-Him, singer-songwriter, starlet, Volume-One, Zooey, Zooey-Deschanel

{ 1 comment }