Almost missed the missing link...

Who knew the missing link would be named "Lucy"?

It's 2003 and John Shanks is looking for his next stepping stone to the elusive SOUND that he hasn't quite nailed yet. He's going to team up with Ashlee and Lindsay soon enough and the sound is forming slowly but surely in a bunch of Hilary Duff tracks and on the first Lillix album...by way of Sheryl Crow and maybe some remaining shades of Melissa Etheridge adult contempo (still haven't heard the Pink album he produced) (EDIT: woops, Shanks only produced a single remix), but a lot of that has been filtered through other acts by now. As far as this makeshift narrative of teen pop is concerned, Michelle Branch is the turning point.

I bought Lucy Woodward's While You Can on a whim because it was three bucks and I was feeling lucky. And I lucked out -- not sure how I even knew to pick this one up except I must have mentally documented everything John Shanks has produced since 2001 or so (I definitely don't remember reading anything else about her now that I have). In my haste to buy it, along with one of those cheezy Dizny comps with some Christy Carlson Romano tracks on it, I didn't even bother to glance at the back and see that the whole thing was produced by Shanks. But I certainly heard Shanks when I popped the CD in.

Teenpop archaeology hat on, I turned to Emily and told her that this must be somewhere around 2002 or 2003, sounds a LOT like Ashlee, but...you know, earlier (I finally purchased a hard copy of Autobiography the day before, also three bucks, so the aesthetic bridge to Lucy Woodward was much clearer -- another argument for owning physical copies of albums, I had very little connection to Ashlee's debut listening to MP3s of it, but I've come to understand it differently; I'll describe it in a bit). Emily couldn't check copyright date/production credits in the car (carsickness, jeez) so we waited it out and finished the album.

She instead asked why I dated it there and I tried to sketch out my understanding of a timeline. Which I thought it might be beneficial to write down.

So Europop Britney/boyband falling out of style by 2001 and other complications (I'm not big on blaming 9/11 for everything changing [anymore] but it did ostensibly prevent Melissa Lefton's Melicious from being released, that counts as a factor, right?) gave way to confessional rock coming into style, part Lilith Fair, part nu-metal, part pop-punk, part Sheryl Crow, part Alanis Morrisette becoming the idol of so many performers at the same time post-Alanis producers of female pop/rock acts were finding a foothold in teenpop production (enter John Shanks). Also Tracy Bonham (covered by the V's), Letters to Cleo (Kay Hanley in another short-lived paradigm shift to power pop 2003-4, not totally in vogue these days but hey "Mandy" finally cracked the RD Top 30 with an extra PR push in Disney advertising), Liz Phair, Courtney Love. Who else?

There's a relative lull 2002-2004 while teenpop, the demographic category and possibly genre since that hasn't been totally decided yet, recuperated from the Britney mk 1 and the "death of the boyband" (yeah right) comes back full force in part by cross-platforming more efficiently. Television/film crossover is a norm now, not just a common phenomenon; it's been standardized. This is part of the reason why Miley Cyrus Montana is such a mindfuck, it's like meta-platforming. Just don't hold me to that word. (Haven't mentioned here but Miley's real first name is DESTINY. DESTINY CYRUS.)

But in that time period (maybe lull is the wrong word for it...transformation?), a bunch of acts fall through the cracks, including Lucy Woodward. She's hedging an awkward fence between bubble R&B sugar diva and proto-Ashlee, but the tracks where a slight snarl comes through point pretty directly to Autobiography. Formal analysis of her album: cool!

So Autobiography. My initial association was instinctual and more based on my personal experience with it...I'm actually hearing Radiohead's The Bends, not by how it sounds (actually maybe a LITTLE bit how it sounds, mid-90s alternative rock gets paranoid) but by how it feels in the chronology of me "discovering" it. So an album comes along and for whatever reason I'm kind of floating around, either because I know nothing about music and need something to believe in (OK Computer) or because something has changed, probably in me but maybe in music, too, and once again I need something to hold on to. I Am Me did it for me, really forced me to ask some hard questions about what music I was listening to, why I was listening to it, and HOW I was listening to it, talking and writing about it. Not that I've answered those questions, but I'm trying to carve out some meaning little by little.

I first heard The Bends about six months after OK Computer, which I can pretty confidently call a formative album in a phase of my life that I've moved past, and Autobiography comes (in non-MP3 form) about six months past I Am Me. It's a bold album; it feels like the start of something. It's meaty, beaty, big and bouncy, sexy, fully formed, confident. But it's not there yet. "There" only happens in retrospect, but it happens, and I think it has happened with Ashlee. The foundation for longevity has been laid, I trust her and I trust who she's working with.

Tangent thought: Radiohead needed the first album they've since all but disowned to even get the chance to record The Bends, but Ashlee's shot was secured in who she was, a sort of celebrity royalty, which in part fuels some of the guilt that helps me relate to her songs, regardless of "who she is" (she is me?). And what kind of assumptions are there inside those quotes, anyway? A friend who likes Ashlee Simpson made an argument that "Shadow" is just "that song," the one she had to record, like "oh, this is my famous sister, I know people are thinking about it so I'm going to write that song to appease their expectations of me as a celebrity"...as if the bizarre circumstances of her own fame (and infamy) are boilerplate for a pop music career. Really, this happens enough to be some sort of Hollywood cliche? I don't think so, but I'm open to some examples.

Anyway, the bottom line is my understanding of what seems to be (for now) the pinnacle of what she and John Shanks and Kara DioGuardi are capable of doing was an integral component of my retroactive understanding of what came before. I love that I heard I Am Me first because it allowed me to subsequently connect to Autobiography in a way that would have been impossible without some hindsight.

Another reason why it's a shame Lucy Woodward never got a second chance -- I hear some potential in the shadows of her voice, those times when she trusts that there is something beyond capable singing (she has a good voice, not necessarily the most interesting voice, at least not on every track) that will reach that mystery mark that both she and John Shanks are groping toward in 2003. But Lucy Woodward has moved on, with a new album being recorded as of April 5 and songwriting credits on Stacie Orrico's best song, "More to Life." Possibly never to relive her days as a (not-so-)missing link.

EDIT: One thing that I overlooked in my initial post (all of a few hours ago) is lyrics, which aren't nearly on the same level as Ashlee's. Several of these songs are full of vague ideas/language, placeholder rhymes that undermine other lyrics, plain ol' mistakes...and I'm having trouble retaining most of the songs after hearing them. Most egregious error I just realized is in "The Breakdown," with this line: "The Rolling Stones and I disagree/ That you can't always get what you need/ And I find it a little hard to believe/ That there ain't enough love to go around/ That's how it breaks on down"...first of all, that is the OPPOSITE of what the Stones are saying, at least the way you've phrased it. What you seem to want to say is "the Rolling Stones and I disagree; I think you can't get what you need." But if the overall message in this song is "hey, shit sucks sometimes," then don't you mean to say is that you find it easy to believe there ain't enough love to go around? So anyway final verdict sez I still hear Ashlee sound in chrysalis here but yeah these lyrics don't stick at all...thank god a professional celebrity stepped in. And having said ALL of that, I should say that I kind of like the story in "Gettin' It On" of two people who know they have no feelings for each other but just can't stop fucking.

Lucy Woodward - The Trouble with Me

Lucy Woodward - Gettin' It On

And check out the streamed tracks at her Myspace.