Search - Jessica Harper :: Inside Out!

Jessica Harper stretches her big, broad voice over three musical styles--jazz, reggae, and calypso--on Inside Out for a sound, rich and lush, that's unmistakably hers, love it or leap right over it on your CD changer. Same rule applies to her lyrics, which leave listeners feeling as though they ought to have signed a waiver: spin this disc and plan to be gone awhile, in effect plucked from your own habitat and planted squarely in hers. Fortunately, it's a place most parents will find familiar, comfortably so. A bundle of songs on Inside Out, which plays like a postscript to 2000's Rhythm in My Shoes, bring us into a bustling household where the family pet is a shoe-chewing, jazz-ditty-inspiring "Little Brown Dog Named Joe" and the breakfast-table chitchat seems lifted from our own kitchens and set to pleasing rhythms. For instance, "Four Boys Named Jordan" opens with a little girl, Elizabeth, explaining her class-seating chart. Sprinkled around the room, sometimes in confusing clusters, are--you guessed it--four fellas who share the same name. On "Lizzy's Do's and Don't's" you can practically hear the disaffected drumming of fingertips--it's Lizzy's plea to her mom not to hide her candy up high and put nuts in the apple pie, among other exasperating day-to-day stuff. At times, the Harper household darts away from the daily grind to celebrate nothing special. "Happy Talk" reminds us, in reggae, to dream, and "Shout the Happiness" is hardly more than a joyous, island-style rant. Regardless of the mood, so much a part of this record, not one of the songs is weak musically. For young families in a funk, it's a friendly, highly original reminder to at least keep it light when you can't kick up your heels. --Tammy La Gorce