Nancy Sinatra plays it cool
Let's be clear upfront: Nancy Sinatra's new, self-titled album out today is not a comeback effort. She's been retooling her image and sound since the mid-1990s, more than three decades after she topped the charts with the anthemic "These Boots Are Made for Walkin'."
No, "Nancy Sinatra" is something bigger and better, an album of savvy pop songs and star-studded collaborations that reenvisions her importance in music. The singer teams with an unlikely roster of musicians who are fans: Morrissey, Pulp's Jarvis Cocker, Bono, Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore, Pete Yorn, Steven Van Zandt, and Tucson alt-rockers Calexico.
In recent interviews, Sinatra, 64, has openly lamented that her own generation has consistently discounted her work as novelty fluff. What her detractors couldn't, and didn't, foresee is that Sinatra's brand of understated cool is back in vogue, even though to many it never disappeared.
Of course, older musicians working with younger admirers is nothing new. (In fact Sinatra recorded some of her most delicious songs with Lee Hazlewood, an eccentric songwriter who was 11 years her senior but seemed even older as the worldweary cowboy foil to her tough-girl heroine.)
But like Loretta Lynn's recent work with Jack White, Sinatra's new collaborations exalt the qualities that distinguish her fellow musicians while adapting them to her own sensibilities. These are flattering songs meant for Sinatra and no one else. Unlike her last album, 1998's "How Does It Feel?," the new disc doesn't pretend to adhere to what's on Top 40 radio.
"Burnin' Down the Spark" opens the album with a blast of swagger reminiscent of choice Nancy-and-Lee duets. Breezy flourishes of mariachi horns, lush strings, and pedal-steel undercurrents imbue it with a Southwestern flavor, as if Sinatra were driving just beyond Austin city limits.
Cocker contributed two songs to the album, and "Don't Let Him Waste Your Time," full of easy hand claps, sounds like something Sinatra would have recorded back in the '60s. She is sublime as the knowing naysayer who forewarns a younger woman, "He can have his space/ He can take his time/
Now he can kiss you where the sun don't shine/ No, baby, don't let him waste your time." Only on "Ain't No Easy Way," a duet with the Blues Explosion's Jon Spencer, does she sound like a nostalgia act. His croak of a voice suggests a tired impersonation of Hazlewood crossed with Elvis Presley. The song is so smarmy and annoying that you have to surmise parody was the objective.
One of the album's creepier moments is "Momma's Boy," penned by Moore and seemingly intended to be sung by Kim Gordon (read: in monotone). Through layers of distorted guitars and drums, it's the type of incestuous lullaby Norman Bates's mum might have sung to him in
"Psycho": "If you're born to be free/ You are born to be with me/ So gather your vicious
friends/ And come and service me." Yep, we're officially a million miles from "Sugar Town." Morrissey has been Sinatra's most celebrated friend and admirer, and his "Let Me Kiss You" is a natural fit for the 21st-century Nancy Sinatra. "There's a place in the sun for anyone who has the will to chase one," she sings. "And I think I've found mine/ Yes, I do believe I have found mine."
Sinatra closes with "Two Shots of Happy, One Shot of Sad," a barroom ballad written by Bono and the Edge for Frank Sinatra, not that you'd ever guess it was for anyone but Nancy. Her spare, torchy delivery against a backdrop of soft piano, percussion, upright bass, and guitar could break your heart with the simple utterance of "You call it compromise/ Well, what's that?"
Surely, Ol` Blue Eyes, who never recorded the song, would have been proud of his oldest daughter. It's taken a long time and several misfires, but finally Nancy Sinatra is not just the foxy blonde who pranced her way up the charts in a pair of white leather boots. As her father once sang, and perhaps foreshadowed, in "Nancy (With the Laughing Face)": "I swear to goodness you can't resist her."
