Beth Hart: Leave The Light On : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

For Beth Hart, making music has always been the eye of an otherwise stormy life. But following an arrest and rehab, she's never looked healthier . . . or sounded more passionate. On her third full-length, Leave the Light On, Hart is a soulful mythologizer of her own self-destruction; the Janis Joplin sound-a-like mixing American roots forms with classic rock into bloodletting songs with mainstream pop appeal. On the title track, the twenty-nine-year old sings "Can the damage be undone? I swore to God I'd never be what I've become . . ." And on an upbeat Black Crowes-style shuffle, she remarks, "I'm just dirty footprints at your door." The record has its lusty and celebratory moments too, and of course plenty of catharsis to offer Adult Pop radio programmers who jumped on her 1999 raw-nerve hit "L.A. Song."

TODD SPENCER
(October 20, 2003)