Jessica Simpson surprises her fans with an impressive take on country
The young woman on the phone sounds thoughtful, introspective, with a slight twang in her pleasant alto voice that becomes more noticeable when she mentions her roots as “just a normal girl from Texas.”
In fact, Jessica Simpson sounds nothing like the confused “Is this chicken or fish?” ditz from the reality show “Newlyweds: Nick & Jessica” or the “I know, buffaloes don’t have wings!” scatterbrain from the Pizza Hut commercials.
This latest incarnation, as a thoughtful singer-songwriter who values honesty and communication over the vacuous life of a pop star in Daisy Dukes and cowboy boots, accompanies her music’s transformation from glossy overproduced pop to modern country-inflected tunes full of emotion.
“Crossing over into country has been such a natural segue for me,” she says from Nashville, a city she loves, although the Dallas area remains her home. “I grew up loving country music, and it was a great way for me to sit down and write from my heart. Now it’s just about my voice and the lyrics and the melodies and it doesn’t have all the glitz and glamour of pop.”
“Come on Over,” the first single from her sixth CD, “Do You Know,” has been well-received. It’s a toe-tapping romantic tune with a melodic pedal steel guitar line supporting Simpson’s smoky voice, which has a more noticeable country inflection.
“The response I’ve been getting the most is, ‘My gosh, I really wanted to not like it.’ People say, ‘I was a skeptic and I didn’t really want to like it, and I listened to it and I can’t stop listening to it, I love it!’ ” says Simpson.
“It is disappointing that people didn’t want to like it, but I just think people have a wrong perception of who I am, and even if people say they don’t believe what they read, they still read it, and it’s still in the back of their minds, no matter what. If my name comes up you think certain things.”
Many of those things aren’t true, she warns. Even her 2003 MTV show with then-new husband Nick Lachey (the two divorced in 2006) was in some ways fiction, she hints: “Reality TV editors are just geniuses when it comes to reactions and piecing [events] together.”
“When people listen to the album, they’re like, ‘You should have done this a long time ago!’ ” says Simpson, punctuating with a brief, bubbly laugh. “But I think I had to experience a lot more of life to get to the place I’m at right now and think about what I’m thinking about.
“My voice has matured, so it’s a little bit deeper. I think when you sing about things that you really believe in, there’s this really great emotion in my voice, and this angst, and then in some songs you feel the pain of the lyric and in other songs you wish you were in love, you know what I mean? It was a very therapeutic experience for me, writing this record, and I’m happy that people are going to get to know Jessica Simpson as a singer again.”
The shift toward country music was one Simpson says she fought for as her career developed. Her major label album debut was “Sweet Kisses,” released in 2000, followed by “Irresistible,” a collection of up-tempo pop tracks. But by the time she was working on her third album, around the same time “Newlyweds” was making her a pop culture superstar, Simpson said her musical interests started to shift.
“I wanted to come out to Nashville and write,” she says. “And everything that I was turning in to the label, they said it was too country. I went back to L. A. and wrote some other stuff and was paired up with totally different songwriters.”
Although she continued to record pop tunes, Simpson remained inspired by the Nashville experience. “I just felt a lot more comfortable in Nashville, with the songwriters here and how organic the process was. People just really care out here about what you’ve been through, and so I’m very blessed to have gotten a chance to do this.
As deadlines for album six neared, Simpson says she put her foot down. She was having considerable success as a designer with a line that now includes shoes and boots, purses, sunglasses, lingerie, jewelry and outerwear.
“I went in to the label, and I said, ‘You guys, I have a lucrative business with the Jessica Simpson Collection, and I could go do movies, and if I have to go and sing at a local bar, I’m fine with that, just as long as I’m singing. But I’m not going to make another record that doesn’t make sense and doesn’t have a consistency about it. ... If I’m going to talk about my experiences in life, I need to make it honest. So if you don’t let me go out to Nashville and write, I won’t make another record.’ ”
Obviously, her argument was successful. And now she adds, “It was the best thing I ever did. Everything on the record is something that I’ve been through.”
Her entry into the world of country music was assisted by none other than Dolly Parton, who wrote the title track on her new album and sings backup vocals on it.
“I believe it’s one of the best songs I’ve ever recorded in my life,” says Simpson. “And I just adore her. She is an inspiration to me. She helped me through a really hard time, and my life has come full circle because of her. She’s so angelic, she took me under her wing and helped with my introduction into the country market; I’ll be forever grateful to her.”
With the shift to country, Simpson says she feels “like a brand new artist for the first time, which is nice. I have butterflies and I’m anxious and I’m so excited for people to hear it, and when I hear it on the radio, I freak out, turn it up, roll the windows down. To experience all that again, to just be at that place of being humble or vulnerable is really refreshing.”
