Jenny Bruce — Soul On Fire

I've got a big fat crush on Jenny Bruce, and it's not just because she's posing on the Soul on Fire album cover in nothing but Christmas lights (although, to be fair, that doesn't hurt). No, my big fat crush is predicated on the following factors:

1. Jenny Bruce's voice, which is a warm, thick orange contralto thing, in which Bruce's intelligence moves like a nimble cat in a well-appointed room — you can hear it work, and you marvel at how effortlessly it gets around. Let's just posit that you don't actually hear singers think all that much; put on a Britney Spears song, for example, and the only thought vibe you get from her voice involves hair products and Pepsi.

Bruce's voice, on the other hand, gives the impression that after she's done with her set, she could drop by the table you're sitting at for a chat and you'd still be there six hours later, pissing off the bartender, who just wants go home, because you and she are having one of those monumental conversations that you get maybe once or twice in a lifetime and which make you both think that what you really need to do is run over to the courthouse and get married right now because, even if you win the lottery and suddenly grow back the hair on your bald spot, it just won't get any better than this one conversation. I mean, sure, Jenny Bruce could be an idiot (and, alternately, Britney Spears could make Stephen Hawking look like a failure at addition). But in both cases, I really don't think so.

2. Jenny Bruce's lyrics — not just the words, which justify the assumption of intelligence intimated in her voice, but the pacing thereof (a minor detail that many lyric-oriented songwriters rather unfortunately forget). These are sure-footed lyrics, confidently placed in their musical context, and telling their stories by phrasing just as much as the words. Bruce knows what she's saying and she knows how to say it — another reason to expect that she gives good conversation, or would be a fine actor.

3. Jenny Bruce's songs, which (as you can probably guess from the rather embarrassingly gooshy lead-up) are groovy, grown-up slices of life. Bruce inhabits that folky sphere of things that is also populated by the likes of Shawn Colvin and Suzanne Vega and Paula Cole, but she sets up her camp far enough away from any of them that you can't easily trace a path from one to the other. The closest possible influence I could find would be Aimee Mann, whose knack for phrasing hovers benevolently over the elegant "Blue Angel," and one's hard-pressed to say this is a bad thing.

Article Author: John Scalzi

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