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Tune Head

Katrina Carlson
Here and Now
Kataphonic Records

Irony and edginess are all well and good, but sometimes you want to indulge in a pure pop album that sings what it means and means what it sings.

Katrina Carlson's latest is just that -- big, mostly sunny renditions of big, mostly sunny songs produced in a generally extroverted manner.

The album teeters on the edge of blandness sometimes, and occasionally trips over its own imagery, but ultimately wins us over with Carlson's sincere, tuneful, life-lesson-lathered, sturdily constructed songs and sweet, wise, big-sister persona. It's musical comfort food, but genuinely comforting -- mashed potatoes with the real butter and salt and pepper and parsley too. It is consolation to offer a bereft friend or listening for a rainy evening, both of which are highly-prized and under-served categories these days, no?

Carlson's cover, with Howard Jones, of Jones's "No One Is to Blame" imbues the original with a special flame of yearning, and has already climbed the adult-contemporary chart. The other tunes are written or cowritten by Carlson.

"Be the One" has an upbeat Kelly Clarkson Top 20 quality. "Here and Now" is a simple, unadultered love song, but seasoned with experience and emotional arc the way it wouldn't have been if sung a couple decades ago by, say, Tiffany. "First to Say Goodbye" effectively bemoans a relationship that has run its course but is reluctant to expire.

"Daisy in Chains," alas, is a weak song with uncharacteristically thin vocals. Its lyrics are also faintly baffling. Even if you're not susceptible to perverse associations (if you don't know what I mean, you are a daisy indeed), would a daisy in chains drowning in the pouring rain really be robust enough to wait patiently all winter? However fine the rhyme, the strain of the refrain gives me pain.

"Lost" also gets a bit lost in its allegory. "Lost dreams, lost at sea, / Sailin' the land of milk and honey / Lost love, afraid to say / What got lost along the way / lost cause, tug of war / Won the battle don't know what for / Lost lives, the buried cost / How could I ever have been so" . . . well, ya know. Clearly what got left behind was the central metaphor, and if you're trying to sail on the land of milk and honey, you may be more lost than you think.

(OK, Tune Head, 'nough of that. She likely meant off the coast of the land of milk and honey anyway, you stick in the mud.)

"When You Kiss Me" goes a lot more smoothly -- harmonious and dealing primarily with things like, well, kisses, and you, and me, and so forth.

The invigorating "Break My Fall" and "Secret" both celebrate new love. Then, just when we're feeling all's right with the world, "Feel for Me" scoops us back into unrequited longing. And on the flip side, "Some Small Way" intelligently strives to let someone go and muddle through until sense can be made.

My fave, though, for the songwriting but also the faintly Aimee Mann-ish musical and emotional tension, is "Enough." It delves into love's proof being in love's pudding. But this time it's my metaphor that drips ungracefully off the spoon, and Carlson's straightforward ballad that gets it just right.

Amanda Shaw
Pretty Runs Deep
Rounder Records

Do you ever play producer? I do. I know it's childish -- like pretending you're a talent scout at a little league game and that you have the skill to spot a legend in the making and send him toward his glorious destiny.

Still, while it may be silly, it's fun, and sometimes instructive. Imagine, for instance, you're Rounder Records producer and VP of A&R Scott Billington, and you start collaborating with an early-teen Cajun fiddle and singing prodigy named Amanda Shaw. She's already a regional musical celeb of sorts, with high-wattage energy, a remarkable stage presence, and -- who can deny it? --cute as a button. What would you do? What style of music would you use? What songs would you choose? How polished and heavy would you want the production? Difficult choices in any case, and particularly tricky with a clear talent who is, naturally, still exploring her musical personae.

You could seize on her roots-music pedigree and start grooming her to be a future Dixie Chick type. You could capitalize on her teen charisma and try to sell her as a Disneyfied Miley Cyrus-style sweet and sassified country-pop sensation. (Shaw starred in two Disney TV movies, so it's not a far-fetched notion.) You could take the lead from her affinity for old Clash, Pretenders, and Cyndi Lauper tunes, brood her down with black hair dye, pale makeup, and purple lipstick, and let her quasi-hysterically shout-sing her way into the post-Alanis angst-angel set, opening for Avril Lavigne, maybe. ("Hey, cheap shot, Tune Head! I like Avril Lavigne." TH: "I like her too. Sorry. My point is that there already is an Avril Lavigne.") You could seize on those delicious, tender ballad moments, fully distinct from anything in her 2004 album, I'm Not a Bubble Gum Princess, and start her toward more of an Alison Krauss gentle songbird approach.

A rationale could be made for each of those strategies, and an experienced producer at a pitch meeting could probably sell any of them.

But Grammy-winning Billington is smarter than that, and that's why he's a producer and I am only a Walter Mitty producer. And Shaw has pretty strong ideas and will of her own, let's assume, so let's not overstate even a respected mentor's say in such matters.

What he and Shaw have arrived at in Pretty Runs Out is a mix of country-pop, blues, traditional Cajun fiddle, funk, and rock. Shaw is never less than fully committed to every tune (though she isn't always quite musically or vocally up to them), but it's a musical dress-up hour, right down to imitation Chrissie Hynde pouty diction and inflection on "Easy on Your Way Out" (or is it Eleni Mandell whom Shaw's imitating there?).

All this might be disconcerting out of context. Who does she think she is? you might be tempted to ask as she changes from musical dungarees to punk leathers and back. But she's 16 -- so "who does she think she is?" is, appropriately enough, who she is. And what a bold and original approach to an album that is, when you think about it -- to let the people in the person hash it out and enjoy each other's talented company. Listen to the 2004 album, and it's even clearer that what we're witnessing here isn't a product in manufacture, or at least not only that, but an artist in formation, with an artist, producer, and entourage wise enough to let that be.

Now the good thing about products in manufacture is that they're highly quality-controlled and consistent. This album, developed over two years and recorded over two months at the end of 2006, isn't always. The title track, by Shaw and Jim McCormick -- a reminder that a girl is more than skin deep and won't be a girl forever -- is a contagious, solid tune perfectly suited to Shaw. She cowrote "Chirmolito," a bluesy salute to some workers from Mexico who helped bail her family out of the damage from Katrina, and obviously enjoys hamming up her throaty Bayou iterations. "French Jig" and "McGee's Medley" are showcases for her traditional fiddling, which I actually found fairly rote and monotonous. "Brick Wall" is Shaw's schoolyard taunt turned funk provocation, and features Troy "Trombone Shorty" Andrews on -- well, you know on what, right?

"Garden of Eden" has a nice marshland twangy "Hark!" kind of opening, but this environmental tune is weak, and the vocals are too. "What's Wrong With You?" is an effectively biting, bitter Bonnie Raittish love-vanishing song that challenges both Shaw's voice and, I infer, her experience, but it's powerful all the same.

"Gone" is another Pretenders-clone song. I like its jauntiness and Shaw's attitude, but the same strangely British-accented creature that's been known to visit Madonna at news conference seems to inhabit Shaw's body here, which is especially weird as the arms playing her furied fiddle on this track are clearly American. "Woulda Coulda Shoulda" allows her vocals to take back their U.S. passport and rocks out convincingly. (It's tunes like this that would make video-producing suits in L.A. see dollar signs dancing in front of their greedy MTV eyes. Just add a lot of reverb, plug in the violin, and spike the band's hair, and voila. Thank goodness, I repeat, that Billington is running this show.)

But if you only listen to two tracks on this album (which, by the way, would be a mistake), make them Diane Warren's song "I Don't Want to Be Your Friend" (maybe Warren's written a bad song in her lifetime, but if so I haven't heard it) and the soft strummer "Wishing Me Away." One of the many annoying things about being a teenage girl, especially an attractive, talented one, must be all the goofball adults spying the vanishing girl and emerging woman in you. But what can I say? This goofball adult's A&R radar blipped mightily on these two tender ballads. They're where I heard Shaw the singer, fiddler, performer, and human being sounding most relaxed, most herself.