Judith Owen is the sort of artist that makes you want to throw labels out the window. So what if she’s generally listed under jazz? There’s nothing on her albums that wouldn’t play well on an intelligent FM rock station — that is, if you can find one these days.
I suppose the jazz tag has stuck to Owen because of her extraordinary vocal purity and technique. Her natural gift is a voice like watered silk, full of coloratura glints and shadows, but she brings in shrewdly intelligent phrasing and a gutsy rhythmic sense that work equally well as alt-rock. Like her frequent collaborator Richard Thompson (another underrated virtuoso), she can get plenty funky when she wants to; comparisons to Dusty Springfield and Chrissie Hynde are equally appropriate.
Owen’s songwriting also steers her latest album, Mopping Up Karma, out of conventional jazz territory. She has crafted numbers that showcase her own talents – scatting melodies that demonstrate huge range and dead-on pitch, restless syncopations that demand keyboard virtuosity - but it’s the content that’s most distinctive. With a voice of such liquid beauty, Owen could easily have gone for lush sentimentality. Instead, Mopping Up Karma is fiercely edgy and ironic. (It comes as no surprise to learn that she’s married to comedian Harry Shearer, a man with his own dark sense of humor.)
Even her love songs are hardly about dewy romance – they’re relentless investigations into the collateral damage of jealousy, betrayal, and cruelty (hence the rueful “mopping up karma” of the title). Other tracks are Lilith-Fair-like declarations about finding your own path, defying expectations, and knowing yourself. Toss in a couple of snarky satires (“She’s Alright,” “Extraordinary”) and you’ve got an album with a spiky sensibility indeed.
Judith Owen’s idea of a making-up song, “Creatures of Habit,” talks more about licking wounds and learning to cope than about reconciliation; “Ruby Red Lips” takes a standard honky-tonk title and twists it into a not-so-thinly veiled threat. “Let’s Hear It For Love” defines love as quintessentially illogical:
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