Macy Gray: The Trouble With Being Myself : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

It's one of R&B's great mysteries: How does a thin, pinched meow of a voice like Macy Gray's manage to sound gutsier and more convincing than an entire roomful of her more vocally gifted neosoul sisters? The answer is in one of the few tricks Gray shares with Thom Yorke: It's not necessarily the words that hook 'em; it's often what you don't say and how you don't say it. So, bending and stretching her phrases to the edge of their breaking point, sending words off her tongue in odd and scarcely recognizable shapes, sliding ahead of and behind the beat and disdaining meter wherever possible, Gray turns her music-school nightmare of a voice into an irresistibly catchy instrument.

On two albums, 1999's breakthrough On How Life Is, and 2001's The Id, Gray has divided audiences with her off-kilter singing but has left few in doubt about her power to get a message across. Set down in a hotbed of loose vintage-organ-spiced, funkified R&B -- the kind that harkens back to the days before big-foot producers began squeezing the breath out of every note -- Gray's voice found its perfect context. Even her songs about pumping hot lead into a wayward lover acquired a buoyant, semiserious flavor.

So it's a good thing that The Trouble With Being Myself doesn't screw around with the formula. Serious Gray fans may wonder what alternative rocker Beck is doing in the credits (it's a tribute to Gray's eclecticism: He co-wrote the song "It Ain't the Money"), but, as ever, Gray sounds like the musical offspring of Al Green and Sly Stone. The spectacular multiplatinum success of her debut album and the merely good sales of The Id might have hinted that perhaps some tinkering was called for, but Gray and her producer, the canny and commercial-minded Dallas Austin, resisted; Myself could almost be side three of The Id. Part biography, part self-analysis, part feminine primal scream, Myself is a tour through familiar Gray territory, spiked with humor and her take-no-bullshit attitude. Fans will instantly recognize the opener, "When I See You," as the sort of straightforward anthem in the mold of "I Try," her biggest hit. But more interesting things await. Dipping into fairy tale on "My Fondest Childhood Memories," Gray conjures a tale of wonderfully skewed heroism: She offs the plumber when she catches him servicing her mom and gives the nanny the same treatment after catching her with her dad. "Grown up now, as you can see," she sings, "my parents are still happily married thanks to me." But mostly, Gray fills the record with her favorite themes: love that's bad for your health, love you know you shouldn't give in to, love that feels good but you know is going to wind up in a ditch. When she sings "She Ain't Right for You" and "She Don't Write Songs About You," both tunes about an intense love about to curdle from its own heat, it's Macy working in her sweet spot, and that's right where she should be.

DAVID THIGPEN
(RS 927, July 24, 2003)