JONATHA BROOKE
"CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR"
(Bad Dog, 2007)
Jonatha Brooke's music is not the kind that immediately grabs your attention. Instead, it's the sort of music that innocently wanders into your playlist and, before you know it, has won you over with its subtle charms. I'm relatively new to her music ... in fact, I have just one of her prevous albums that I'm still warming up to, and only got this one after sampling the sound clips out of curiosity, and that was only because I found out that J.C. Chasez (yes, that guy from NSYNC) co-wrote and sings backup on a handful of this album's songs.
At first, Jonatha Brooke's voice sounds fairly ordinary ... but the more one listens to the album, the more one realizes that she knows how to use her voice: it's nimble and precise, not just in its pitch, but also in its mood. There's perseverance (the slightly countrified "Keep The River On Your Right"), regret (the heavy "Prodigal Daughter"), wariness (the lighter-than-air "Baby Wait") ... and there's even a French-language song thrown in to stir things up (and to test the hazy knowledge of high-school French that still lingers in my brain). And hey, any artist who can pull off using a bassoon in a pop song (or two) has to be commended, right?
Jonatha Brooke is one of those artists who will probably never have a double-platinum blockbuster album, or a Top-10 hit single, or a video in heavy rotation on VH-1. But she's been making music for awhile now ... long enough, probably, that I suspect that not having achieved such success doesn't bother her one bit.
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