Title:Be Not Nobody By: Carlton, Vanessa Released by: A&M Released on: April 30, 2002 Rating (out of 10): 4 Date: 05/06/2002
A Whole Lot Of Wasted Talent
Once upon a time, I was really into the female singer-songwriter movement. Tori Amos, Sarah McLachlan, Fiona Apple...liked them all. I guess my interest waned around the time that Tori Amos stopped making good music. Sarah McLachlan relegated herself to recycling previous ideas and running Lilith Fair. It wasn’t just my interest that waned. The entire nation turned its back on the movement, as is amply evidenced in dwindling record sales across the board for female singer-songwriters, from Amos to Morrisette to Jewel.
So along comes Vanessa Carlton, lauded by Rolling Stone as one of the artists to watch in 2002. “A more pop oriented Fiona Apple,” they called her. Well, thank you Rolling Stone, for getting to the root of the problem right away. Carlton is a watered down version of Fiona Apple, Tori Amos, and Lisa Loeb. She manages, at various times, on her debut album, Be Not Nobody, to sound like all of the above. Unfortunately, She doesn’t exhibit any of the qualities that make those artists great in their own way. She lacks Tori Amos’ menace, she shows nothing of Apple’s knowing sensuality, and Loeb’s wide-eyed innocence is nowhere to be found.
I can almost guarantee that this is what happened. A pretty little waif records a demo, just her and a piano. It gets shopped around and picked up. Of course, there is a price—no control. The studio picks the producer, the producer picks the session musicians, and why not throw in an orchestra on a couple of tracks for good measure. The result? The dilution of something that could have been pretty decent if you strip away the over-production.
The disc’s opener, “Ordinary Day,” is the type of song that Tori Amos hasn’t written since Little Earthquakes. Unfortunately, the track is drenched in slick production, including an unnecessary string section. Still, the track is pleasant enough, and doesn’t spell doom for the album quite yet.
The disc’s second cut, “Unsung,” has some interesting ideas, especially the keyboard playing. But it’s mostly a mess, good ideas that never coalesce. Lisa Loeb should be suing for plagiarism over the discs third track, “A Thousand Miles.” It's a bombastic update of Loeb’s “Stay,” even to the point of recycling some of the lyrics. The song is catchy, but it won’t lodge itself in your brain the way that “Stay” did.
It’s all down hill from here, with anything decent Carlton might have to offer buried underneath the studio wankery of her supporting cast. Particularly embarrassing is her cover of The Rolling Stones, “Paint It Black.” I recently read a comment about the I Am Sam soundtrack which espoused the opinion that there aren’t a whole lot of bad Beatles covers, because the source material is so excellent. I guess this can be applied to The Stones as well, after hearing Uncut magazine's two excellent CDs of Rolling Stones covers. This, however, is on the same embarrassment level as Britney Spears' cover of “Satisfaction.”
Vanessa Carlton obviously has some talent. It’s too bad that on Be Not Nobody it’s lost under the weight of her influences.
