Anywhere I Lay My Head

The album, entitled Anywhere I Lay My Head includes 10 Tom Waits covers and one original, “Song for Jo”, composed by Scarlett and TV On The Radio’s Dave Sitek. Anywhere I Lay My Head will be released on Rhino Records’ Atco label on May 20, 2008. Johansson, who has been singing since she was little but doesn’t consider herself a songwriter, was offered a record deal a while back – but delayed recording until she could come up with the right songs to cover. She had originally planned to record an album of standards, then changed her mind after adding “I Never Talk to Strangers” to her repertoire. “I wanted to do ‘Never Talk To Strangers’, a duet between Bette Midler and Tom Waits,” she said. “People were like, ‘You’re going to do a Tom Waits song with a bunch of Cole Porter songs? That’s kind of strange.’ It turned into ‘Hmm, maybe a few more Tom Waits songs. Actually, I’ll do a whole album of Tom Waits songs.'”

Scarlett spent 33 days in Maurice in May-June 2007 recording her debut CD at Dockside Studio. Owned by Steve and Wish Nails, Dockside is a 12-acre recording complex hidden along the Vermilion River. Scarlett worked from 6 PM to 6 AM daily in the studio with producer Sitek. Nick Zinner of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Celebration also performed on the recordings, which Steve Nails describes as cinematic rock. “It’s like theater, big screen,” said Nails, who sat in on all the sessions. “Lots of heavy bass tones in it. Without a bass guitar, we used all kind of different instruments to create these sounds. It was a great experiment. Very avant garde.” Sitek comparted Johansson’s baritone voice to Debbie Harry while Nails commented that she sounds like Marilyn Monroe.

Days before recording began, Johansson found herself sitting next to David Bowie at a party – Bowie also co-starred with her in The Prestige but they shared no scenes together. “He said, ‘Hey, I hear you’re working with Dave Sitek,'” Scarlett says. “I said, ‘Yeah, I’m super excited.’ In my mind I was thinking ‘If you get a chance come down to Louisiana, we’ll be down there for five weeks.’” Bowie never made it down, but while Scarlett was filming Vicky Cristina Barcelona in Spain Sitek called her to say Bowie had just dropped by during mixing and cut vocals for “Falling Down” and “Fannin’ Street.” “It was the best phone call I ever got,” Scarlett says.

No live shows are planned to support the record, but Johansson hopes that will change. “It would be sad to not get everybody together, whether it’s at a festival or somewhere fun,” she says. “I think to be in a environment that’s user friendly and get everybody together and do some of the songs live would be great. There are no plans now, but it would be a shame not to.”

Scarlett says that musician friends in high school brought Tom Waits’ music to her attention, and she remains an avid fan. “I’ve always considered Tom Waits to be kind of a composer of modern standards; he has a lot of beautiful ballads and really heartbreaking songs.” What does Waits himself think of the record? “I’ve heard through friends that he’s very pleased with it and excited about it,” Johansson says. “I didn’t want to go into it without his blessing. I sent him some of the early, early recordings that we did and he was like ‘Go ahead, go forth with it.'”

Commercial performance

Anywhere I Lay My Head debuted at number 126 on the Billboard 200, selling 5,100 copies in its first week. The album fared better in Europe, reaching number 15 in Switzerland, number 25 in Austria, number 26 in France, number 27 in Sweden, and number 30 in Belgium and Germany. By August 2009, the album had sold about 25,000 copies worldwide.

• Australian Hitseekers Albums 9
• Austrian Albums 25
• Belgian Albums 30
• Belgian Albums 45
• European Albums 27
• French Albums 26
• German Albums 30
• Irish Albums 65
• Scottish Albums 71
• Spanish Albums 77
• Swedish Albums 27
• Swiss Album 15
• UK Albums 64
• US Billboard 200 126

Critical reception

Anywhere I Lay My Head received mixed reviews from music critics. At Metacritic, which assigns a weighted mean rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the album received an average score of 58, based on 35 reviews, indicating “mixed or average reviews”. Priya Elan of the NME called the album “brilliant” and wrote that “just like Lou Reed with Nico and Serge Gainsbourg with Brigitte Bardot, Sitek has effortlessly translated Johansson’s magnetism on to record”, while comparing her “deep” voice to “latter-day Ronnie Spector’s street-savvy tone”. The Observer’s Barney Hoskyns commented that Johansson’s “blankly androgynous alto timbre is nothing special, but that barely matters”, praising the album as “a bravely eccentric selection and a captivating homage to a singular writer”. The Guardian’s Dorian Lynskey described Johansson’s voice as “a supple, languid instrument offering hints of Nico, Kim Deal and Martina Topley-Bird” and stated, “You might wish there was more from Waits’ 70s barfly period […] but it’s a measure of this album’s surprising allure that you’re left wanting more.”

AllMusic reviewer Stephen Thomas Erlewine found Johansson to be “surprisingly deep and brittle as a singer”, concluding that the album “doesn’t quite work, but it can’t quite be dismissed, either: unlike so many actor-turned-singer records, there’s not a hint of vanity to this project and it’s hard not to marvel at its ambition even as it fails.” Mikael Wood of Spin wrote, “Beyond the fact that her voice is deep enough for her to front Crash Test Dummies, there’s nothing particularly compelling about Scarlett Johansson’s singing”, adding that “her vocals are buried deep beneath […] Dave Sitek’s mountain of reverbed space-gospel noise.” Nevertheless, Wood opined the album is “[n]ot your typical Hollywood vanity project”. Chris Willman of Entertainment Weekly remarked, “In burying Johansson’s vocals so deeply in the druggy ambiance, producer David Andrew Sitek […] means well but ends up obscuring Waits’ great tunes.”

Stephen M. Deusner of Pitchfork viewed the album as “a Brooklyn update on vintage 4AD bands like This Mortal Coil or Cocteau Twins”, but noted that “[t]he only thing we’ve learned about her is that she really, really likes Tom Waits. That’s more than enough to avoid catastrophe, but not quite enough to make Anywhere I Lay My Head much more than a curio.” Rolling Stone’s Will Hermes critiqued that “Johansson’s voice is unremarkable and her pitch sometimes unsteady”, dubbing her “a faintly goth Marilyn Monroe lost in a sonic fog”. Dave Hughes of Slant Magazine expressed that Johansson is “neither a particularly interesting nor a particularly skillful singer, and she spends much of the record locked into a sub-Nico hum that’s quite a bit less charismatic than her husky line readings might suggest.” Alex Denney of Drowned in Sound concluded, “Perversely given the record’s comprehensive musical overhaul it’s perhaps a surfeit of respect for the source material that proves Anywhere…’s undoing; for all its undoubted accomplishments there’s a lingering suspicion that this is too safe, too respectable a record to do justice to an artist who remains forever mid-topple from the bar stool in the popular consciousness.”