Victoria Williams – Sings Some Ol’ Songs
From her opening count-off to the quick, closing fade-out, Victoria Williams delivers a charming, fun, touching, old-fashioned record, the perfect soundtrack to when you’re feeling both full of life and melancholy.
As the title explains, it’s an unpretentious collection of covers — standards you’ve heard a million times, such as “Somewhere Over The Rainbow” (which, given Williams’ voice, could be the Munchkins’ response to Dorothy’s original), and less familiar numbers such as “Mongoose”, a calypso-exotica novelty by Eben Ahbez. The closest comparison might be to Rickie Lee Jones’ two covers collections, Pop Pop (1991) and It’s Like This (2000): The folk-jazz-pop musical approaches are similar, the recordings are low-key, and the releases are clearly not career moves.
In other words, only Victoria’s fans will pay much attention to this one, and only the diehards will buy it. That reality is part of the music’s appeal, and part of what’s wrong with the world. “To sing out songs is goood [sic] for the soul,” Williams writes in her liner notes, and she has never sounded this focused or this comfortable with her quirky self. As a small cast of accompanists provides respectful, mainly acoustic backing, Williams roams through these vast, cast-iron structures of feeling so open-heartedly that you can’t separate the singer from the songs. She doesn’t turn them into a self-portrait, but you can’t imagine the songs without her.