CHOOSING SONGS THAT SOUND A LOT LIKE LIFE
By STEPHEN HOLDEN
New York Times
NEW YORK — “I don’t like boundaries, and I don’t like labels,” Audra McDonald said in a tone of mild exasperation. “People have said, ‘Are you trying to become Norah Jones?’ I’m not trying to cross over into any damn world. These are just songs that are beautiful and have great meaning.”
McDonald, a supremely gifted lyric soprano and actress whose musical career straddles Broadway and the classical concert stage, was reflecting on the pre-release reaction to her audacious new album, “Build a Bridge,” out this week on Nonesuch Records. Produced and arranged by Doug Petty, it carries her further into contemporary pop than she has ever ventured.
Leading off with the Elvis Costello-Burt Bacharach cri de coeur “God Give Me Strength,” the album includes songs by the likes of John Mayer (“My Stupid Mouth”), Nellie McKay (“I Wanna Get Married”), Neil Young (“My Heart,”), Laura Nyro (“To a Child” and “Tom Cat Goodbye”), and Randy Newman (“I Think It’s Going to Rain Today”).
Their juxtaposition with two songs by Adam Guettel and one by Ricky Ian Gordon (a collaboration with Jessica Molaskey) — theater composers who straddle the same worlds as McDonald — illustrates her conviction that wonderful songs are wonderful songs, whatever their origins.
McDonald has no buried pop history. Sitting in a Nonesuch conference room on recent drizzly afternoon, McDonald, a trim, self-possessed woman of 36 who exudes an eager, high-strung intelligence, admitted she never paid close attention to pop while growing up in Fresno, Calif. “My parents were listening to a lot of what at the time was pop music, when it was a different thing from what it is now,” she recalled. “There was lots of jazz playing in the house, but also Blood, Sweat and Tears, and Earth, Wind and Fire. My Mom loved singers like Linda Ronstadt. But she also had Leontyne Price and Chopin going on. In the ’80s, I might have tried to sing Whitney Houston’s ‘Saving All My Love For You’ at a high school talent show.”
In choosing the songs for the album, McDonald, a self-professed Judy-Barbra fan (as in Garland and Streisand), cited a blend of theatricality and personal identification as criteria.
“I wanted to make an album that wasn’t necessarily theater music but whose material spoke to me that way,” she said. “The songs I landed on felt like they had a story or a character I could get into and really explore.”
“God Give Me Strength,” introduced in the 1996 movie “Grace of My Heart,” was suggested by two people: Dan Lipton, a sometime accompanist, and her friend Diana Krall, who is married to Costello.
“What I loved about the song is that it’s the cry of someone who’s not just desperate but someone looking for an answer,” she explained. “It has different peaks and valleys of emotion that go from upset to vengeful to absolute loss, in which the only thing left is to cry out to God. It could be the discovery of an atheist who thinks, ‘Since I have nothing else, I might as well turn to this.’”
McDonald said she had never heard of the singer-songwriter John Mayer until her musical director, Ted Sperling, introduced her to “My Stupid Mouth” (from Mayer’s 2001 album “Room for Squares”).
“I completely identify with it, because my entire life I’ve had a very big mouth that says the wrong thing,” she said.
“Bein’ Green,” Joe Raposo’s popular “Sesame Street” song written for Kermit the Frog, reflected her sense of being an outsider as a black person growing up in a white neighborhood and attending a mostly white high school in Fresno, she said. Rufus Wainwright’s “Damned Ladies,” which offers hard-headed advice to Tosca, Violetta, Mimi, and other tragic operatic heroines as they plummet toward doom, addresses McDonald’s passion for opera and her humorous awareness of herself as a “drama queen.”
But it is in the album’s two Laura Nyro songs, both introduced to her eight years ago by the conductor Michael Tilson Thomas, who was struck by their similar vocal qualities and ranges, that the lines between pop and art song completely evaporate. Until he pointed out the similarity, she hadn’t paid much attention to Nyro.
It was a single phrase, “an elf on speed” in “To a Child” (from the 1984 album “Mother’s Spiritual”) that determined McDonald to record the song.
“For a mother it couldn’t be described any better,” said McDonald, whose 5 1/2-year-old daughter, now in kindergarten, keeps her “in the moment.”
“Every time I sing, she says: ‘Mommy, stop it. You’re doing it again,’” McDonald said and laughed. “She says my singing makes her ears cry.”
But it is in her rendition of “Tom Cat Goodbye,” a howl of murderous fury by a character name Rosie Pearl to the faithless father of her children, that McDonald abandons decorum to scream and growl a blistering diatribe.
Asked if she has ever been emotionally devastated like that, McDonald replied, “Of course.”
"Most artists have,” she added. “Why do you think I get on stage? Tom Cat is a very specific person in my life, and I’m sure he knows who he is.”
Cheers,
Rob
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