Listening to She and Him, the brainchild of actress Zooey Deschanel (aka the older sister to Cameron Crowe’s William Miller in Almost Famous) and local Portland singer/songwriter M. Ward (knob-turner for Jenny Lewis and Norah Jones collaborator) is like falling in love and playing your favorite record over and over again and you don’t even care if it skips.
Their first collaboration, Volume One, (Volume Two due out any day now) is the kind of decades-old sound full of sweet ditties that make you want to throw on a poodle skirt and dust the house while singing along just for fun.
Maybe it’s Deschanel’s raspy reverbed-soaked voice and Ward’s milky guitar licks played through a vintage amp crackle that make it sound like it’s being played from a dusted-off record, but whatever it is, such a sunny outlook probably wouldn’t be what you’d expect to keep you warm on a cold winter’s eve at SXSW (in Texas, if you don’t like the weather just give it ten minutes) but the crowd braved 40-degree weather just to hear the Hollywood maven and her right-hand man croon and swoon, making even the sexed-up poppy sounds of Sonny and Cher’s “I’ve Got You Babe” seem like they meant it forever.
