As a songwriter, Anna Wilson is a member of the Nashville combine that provides material for country singers. As a singer, she aspires to be a nightclub chanteuse before a small rhythm section, performing sophisticated love songs in a style that used to be thought of as "pop" or "traditional pop," but that now passes for "jazz." Just from listening casually to her second album, Time Changes Everything, one might think it was made in the 1950s, or certainly no later than the early '60s, and its songs written decades before that. A more careful listen, however, would reveal Wilson's original compositions to be pale imitations of the songs they resemble. What gives the game away is not just the occasional contemporary reference to e-mail, but the sloppier modern approach to the writing. The word "standard" as applied to well-known songs of the mid-20th century contains the suggestion that they are songs written when there were standards of quality, higher standards than those in effect today. The old saying "Rhyme perfectly or not at all" may have held in the Tin Pin Alley times, but as the largely oral forms of country and blues merged into the rock & roll that swamped pop music from the '60s on, a new rule came into effect in which near-rhymes were acceptable. If the vowel sounds were the same, it was OK to pretend that words ending in "n" and words ending in "m" rhymed, or that, say, "forever" could be rhymed with "together" and "treasure." That's the standard in effect in Nashville (as in New York and Los Angeles, for that matter), even though this kind of writing would have gotten a lyricist thrown out of offices all over Tin Pin Alley with the advice, "Buy a rhyming dictionary!" To be fair, such writing is, to quote another old saying, "Good enough for rock & roll" (and good enough for the Nashville combine). But it isn't good enough for a writer/performer who is trying to come off as the next Ira Gershwin or E.Y. Harburg. When you sing songs like this, emphasizing the lyrics and delighting in the apparent wordplay, that wordplay has to hold up, and it simply doesn't when you rhyme "through" with "rule" and "trace" with "stay," as Wilson does on this album. As a singer, she has the sound of traditional pop down pat, and her accompanists provide an attractive jazzy backing. But the material doesn't pass muster. You just can't be sophisticated and unlettered at the same time.
© William Ruhlmann /TiVo