Scissor Sisters’ Jake cuts a very dashing debut
LOOKING to re-launch their pop careers after long breaks, two American singers turned to Broadway to get their creative juices flowing again.
Scissor Sisters frontman Jake Shears and San Diego singer-songwriter Jason Mraz release albums today — both after stints in New York musical theatre.
Extrovert Shears donned red stilettos for three months to take on the ‘delicious challenge’ of starring in Kinky Boots, the Tony Award-winning musical with a score by Cyndi Lauper.
Laid-back Mraz appeared, also for three months, with singer Sara Bareilles in Waitress.
The Broadway effect is more pronounced with Shears. His first solo album opens with swirling, show-tune strings, and his recent single Sad Song Backwards is an upbeat break-up song belonging firmly in theatreland. There’s also a touch of music hall to his big ballad Everything I’ll Ever Need.
But Shears, 39, is a more thought-ful performer than his showy personality suggests. The Scissor Sisters, who broke down barriers as a radio-friendly pop act comprising three gay and two straight members, have been on hiatus since 2012, and he is clearly ready for an artistic detour.
Now living in New Orleans, he made the album with musicians who usually play with Kentucky country rockers My Morning Jacket. Producer Kevin Ratterman is gritty U.S. soul man Ray LaMontagne’s pianist of choice. The overall mood is down and dirty.
When Shears says he was inspired by the Bee Gees, he isn’t talking about their 1970s disco heyday, but an earlier, psychedelic incarnation that produced the 1969 concept album Odessa.
There are surprising moments. Shears salutes his adopted hometown on Mississippi Delta (I’m Your Man). There’s a folky, Laurel Canyon feel to All For What, and nods to ZZ Top on novelty number Big Bushy Mustache.
He’s also more confessional than we’ve come to expect. Lamenting the end of a long relationship, he addresses ‘the grief and bitter pain’ on Sad Song Backwards. The Bee Gees influences are there on Everything I’ll Ever Need. ‘Sometimes I feel as if I’m a stranger to myself,’ he sings.
With Shears’s falsetto in fine shape, echoes of his sassy, pop past remain. The kitsch disco of S.O.B. — ‘I’ve got sex on the brain, willpower goes down the drain’ — would have slotted perfectly onto a Scissor Sisters album were it not for its country guitar, while The Bruiser reprises the throbbing pulse of Iggy Pop’s Nightclubbing.
There are moments when he could do with the pop nous of former co-writer Scott Hoffman, aka Babydaddy. Their partner-ship propelled the Scissor Sisters to success. But Shears is follow-ing his own instincts here.
There’s a less theatrical slant to Jason Mraz’s comeback. The trilby- hatted singer, whose Broadway run ended in February, emerged from the same San Diego coffeehouse circuit as Jewel and Gary Jules, and is best known for his decade-old acoustic hit I’m Yours. H
IS first album in four years suggests he hasn’t exactly moved on. Sunny pop songs dominate, with Have It All and the reggae- tinged Making It Up echo-ing the ‘happy hippy’ spirit of I’m Yours.
Have It All was inspired by a blessing Mraz received from a Buddhist monk. Making It Up concludes that a boat should be rowed ‘gently down the stream’.
Meghan Trainor guests on country ballad More Than Friends, and Might As Well Dance was part-inspired by San Diego punk band Blink-182 — the closest Mraz comes to anything remotely edgy.
In troubled times, there’s undoubtedly a place for the cheerful troubadour. But this return would have been much more tempting with a less saccharine taste.