The Industry Standards

By Josh Tyrangiel

Blame Tony Bennett. Blame his son, actually. It was Danny Bennett who resuscitated his father's career by parading old Tone down the red carpet at every mid-'90s hipster event that attracted a camera. The incongruity of Tony Bennett next to K.D. Lang and the Red Hot Chili Peppers made for great gossip-page photographs and generated enough heat to get Dad his own MTV Unplugged, and that's where Tony really shook things up. He stood by the piano in his shiny suit and sang the exact same standards he has been singing since Larry King was a boy. People marveled--What a voice! What taste! What class! But the only thing that had changed was the context.

A decade later, singers looking to revive their careers are still picking over Danny Bennett's marketing plan. And they are misinterpreting it with amazing predictability. Instead of learning the lesson that it's possible to get attention for doing what you have always done, the new crop of career revisionists is trying to get attention for doing what Tony Bennett has always done: sing standards. Former teen angel Mandy Moore has a new standards album; even legendary cradle robber Rod Stewart has two. Standards are now perceived as the foolproof way for singers to flex their urbanity and be congratulated on their good taste while also appealing to those aging boomers who still roam the record racks.

It has worked for Stewart, financially at least. Having rasped his way through 2002's It Had to Be You...The Great American Songbook, an album that sold 2 million copies, Stewart got right back into his tux for As Time Goes By...The Great American Songbook: Volume II. Stewart is a master of tawdry sincerity--he's rock's best B singer--and hearing him cover A material would make for a tacky thrill if he weren't so dreadfully serious in his approach. Instead of turning in a winking version of I'm in the Mood for Love or Don't Get Around Much Anymore, Stewart rearranges his phrasing to fit the classic material; neither benefits, and the result is an album that feels as if it has been untethered from a cheesy romantic comedy. It's eerily soulless.

Moore, like Stewart, is out to class herself up a bit. She has gracefully apologized for the sonic misadventures of her teen-pop years, and on Coverage, she tries to position herself for the future with versions of Carly Simon's Anticipation, Carole King's I Feel the Earth Move and Joni Mitchell's Help Me. These are eclectic choices that would help define Moore's aesthetic--if only she had one. On Earth, Moore is bold; on Cat Stevens' Moonshadow, she is delicate; and on a particularly bad version of Blondie's One Way or Another, she even tries vamping. After a few tracks, you realize she's not covering these singers but coveting their personas. A dozen songs later, it's still hard to say exactly what Moore sounds like.

Ronald Isley's standards album--Here I Am: Isley Meets Bacharach--succeeds for the very reason Stewart's and Moore's fail. Rather than fit his classic R.-and-B. voice into the dull formalism of Burt Bacharach's songs, Isley spirits away the songwriter's greatest hits to slow-jam land. On Close to You, he plays endlessly with single words like "why" and "close," seducing them until he decides they have had enough. His quasi-religious version of Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head is the album's signature triumph. It's not just that Isley invents powerful high notes where previously there was just empty space but that he instinctively knows which lyrics matter, repeating "On my head, on my head" during the chorus until the song feels like a gospel ballad. Never mind that Bacharach--who conducted the orchestra--inserts one of his signature flugelhorn solos into the bridge; Raindrops is Isley's song now.

Cyndi Lauper doesn't have Isley's voice--or anybody's voice--and the thought of her attacking the Etta James classic At Last (it's like Hamlet's "To be or not to be" speech for chanteuses) at first seems like a profoundly bad idea. But throughout her standards album, also titled At Last, Lauper embraces her own fragility. She's not strong on the high notes of Walk On By (again with the Bacharach!) or Unchained Melody, but she's exceedingly clean and emotional. She's also very much herself. Lauper performs Makin' Whoopee with a Teutonic exhaustion worthy of Madeline Kahn. It's a great, funny interpretation made even better when, halfway through, Tony Bennett shows up for a little banter. Lauper isn't redefined by At Last--she'll forever just want to have fun--but Bennett comes off great. That son of his is a genius.