Key issues
Diana Krall trades jazz for piano-bar pop on her new album.
The most surprising thing about Diana Krall’s new album, Wallflower, isn’t that it features ’60s and ’70s pop covers — she used to play them in six-hour piano-bar gigs, when cutting her teeth as a performer. And it’s not the duet with Bryan Adams — she’d blast his music while driving to those gigs — or even the fact that on the track, their voices, as she puts it, sound “shockingly the same.” Rather, it’s way the reigning queen of vocal jazz plays it straight.
“They’re great songs the way they were written,” Krall says. And where previously, on 2004’s The Girl in the
Other Room, she swung through contemporary pop with a small jazz band,
Wallflower sets ballads such as Bob Dylan’s title track and The Eagles’ “Desperado” to steady (if subtle) beats, with orchestration overseen by megaproducer David Foster. On the phone from Montreal, where she’s recuperating from emergency dentistry — “I’m just sitting here with my fuzzy slippers and a bowl of mashed potatoes, with a swollen cheek” — Krall’s enthused by her latest project. Having been sidelined for three and a half months with severe pneumonia, she’s returning with a sense of determination.
The songs on Wallflower, she says, “always meant something to me ... I wasn’t trying to make them into jazz standards — just doing them in my own way.” In a separate interview from his Los Angeles studio, Foster, who helmed Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You” and Celine Dion’s “The Power of Love” among others, adds, “Believe it or not, we wore each other’s hats. I said to Diana many times: ‘Let’s put some jazz chords in it,’ and she said, ‘No ... I don’t want to add to what the writers gave me.’ I didn’t understand it at the time.”
While it’s not unusual for pop stars to dabble in jazz standards — often with commercial success, as with Lady Gaga joining Tony Bennett on Cheek to Cheek (which won the Grammy for traditional pop vocals album this past Sunday) — the reverse direction is fraught with peril. Jazz stars making pop records are often said to have lost credibility, or simply sold out. Krall makes light of this: Dexter and Frank, her twin eight-year-old boys with Elvis Costello, saw “a review on iTunes — we were all piled in bed watching Charlie Chaplin, and they were saying, ‘Mommy, someone is disappointed. It got two stars.’ And then they said, ‘Daddy, somebody said mummy’s sexy!’ [and started] running down the hallway screaming and laughing.”
Critics’ reviews have been mixed — from The New York Times’ assertion that Wallflower “has the feel of a sullen concept album by a woman who feels abandoned” to NPR’s Ann Powers’ praise of “a loving look back at some of the music that shaped her.” But what gets Krall’s goat is the suggestion that she somehow wasn’t in charge. She references Björk’s recent interview with Pitchfork, where the Icelandic songstress asserted that, for women artists, “everything that a guy says once, you have to say five times.”
Says Krall, “I find doing interviews on this record, [people say], ‘Oh, David Foster’s taken you away from the piano, and it’s really terrible what they’ve done to you,’ and well, David was actually pushing me to play the piano. I’m like, ‘I’m totally comfortable with this decision, and I don’t feel it compromises me as an artist,’ but unfortunately, a lot of people have made a big stink out of it. Or it’s my husband’s fault that I’ve done this.” Such gender-based criticism, she says, is “so old that I don’t even really want to give it life anymore.”
Foster is effusive: “She’s more than my musical equal. … I have this great admiration for her, so when she handed [the piano chair] over to me, it was like the feeling when Herbie Hancock [when recording the 1982 track “Paradise”] said, ‘You play instead of me,’ and I was going, ‘What? Are you f--king kidding me?’ ”
Foster plays piano on most of the record, both because, according to Krall, he was more comfortable than she in the sometimes esoteric key signatures they’d adopt, and because she could focus on the singing. “These aren’t easy stories to tell,” she says, of songs that suit her penchant for melancholy, from Gilbert O’Sullivan’s “Alone Again (Naturally)” to her friend Elton John’s “Sorry Seems to Be the Hardest Word.”
And despite the carefully sculpted sonic setting, the recording preserves some of what Krall calls “the integrity of the first take.” “It’s not my style,” says Foster, “I’m Mr. Non-Spontaneity ... but I acquiesced to her. On at least two or three occasions, [the] ‘Let’s just try it and see if we like it’ vocals and piano parts became the record. In the studio with the speakers blaring [and] leakage into the microphone, she just grabbed the song and sang the shit out of it.”
Fans of Krall’s more buoyant work will perk up when they hear her boisterous cover of Georgie Fame’s 1965 hit “Yeh Yeh,” complete with horns, Joey DeFrancesco’s scampering organ work, and vocals from Fame himself — although it’s relegated to the deluxe version. Tacking it onto the album proper, says Krall, would be “like putting an Austin Powers-type groove at the end of ‘Only the Lonely!’ ”
Instead, Wallflower ends with Crowded House’s “Don’t Dream It’s Over,” with a harp that supplies one of the album’s shimmers of unexpected stardust. Likewise, the drifting “California Dreaming” comes to life out of nowhere with a Casiotone beat; the 10cc’s “I’m Not in Love” unfurls a dreamy section that samples the original’s eerie wordless vocals; Graham Nash and Stephen Stills supply unearthly harmonies on Jim Croce’s “Operator.” Even though the strings at times become syrupy, there’s always the counterweight of Krall’s contralto, both dignified and wistful.
For Foster, Wallflower finds the 50-year-old Krall “reliving her childhood” — albeit 12 studio albums into her career, when she can give radio standards a new dimension. Her restraint, it would seem, isn’t the result of reticence, but rather wisdom. “She said, ‘I don’t need to fancy it all up with all that other stuff that I can do, but why should I?’ As with most great artists, she’s trying to be true to herself.”
The songs meant something to me … I wasn’t trying to make them into jazz standards