Madeleine Peyroux – Careless Love

Eight years after her first recording, the promising, commercially successful Atlantic release Dreamland, Madeleine Peyroux finally returns with her second outing, and it’s again a potpourri of jazz-inflected readings of very varied songs — everyone from Bob Dylan to Elliott Smith to Hank Williams to Gene Austin to Edith Piaf.

This may even be a more hospitable time for Peyroux’s musical ideas, in the wake of the massive acceptance of the essentially similar Cassandra Wilson-influenced song mix from Norah Jones. (There’s a direct connection: Peyroux’s sometime song collaborator Jesse Harris also wrote some of the first Jones hits.) No one will confuse Madeleine with Norah, however; she’s focused on arguably more challenging breezy swing than the latter’s slow ballads.

Peyroux was initially celebrated as a young Billie Holiday sound-alike, which was more likely to be an albatross than a compliment over time. Her years performing since the first record have somewhat evolved that situation; in a certain tone and speed range, as on the Leonard Cohen-penned opener “Dance Me To The End Of Love”, the lilting low tones, flutter and phrasings of Holiday’s later years are channeled again, but as the variety of tunes plays out, a more self-defined Peyroux sound emerges — smooth, circling around midrange notes, energized, and built on her own smart reading of the lyric, not anyone else’s patterns. She takes Dylan’s “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go”, and Hank’s “Weary Blues” to whole new places this way.