If you're a
Prince and/or Wendy and Lisa fan, I highly recommend picking up the dynamic
female duo's new album, "Snapshots."
Unfortunately,
Wendy and Lisa's new joint is not a full-length album but rather an EP with
just six songs. For those of us who are longtime fans of the duo who became
famous as members of the Revolution, Prince's Purple Rain-era backup band, and hunger for more musical product,
we have to be satisfied to feast on scraps. The upside is that the
"Snapshots" EP comes with a photo book with some interesting candid
shots, makes a nice coffee table book.
"Snapshots"
is mostly an instrumental mood album, with relaxing, New Age-sounding music -
Enya meets smooth jazz. There is one hard-rocking jam, "Perfect
Stranger," on which Wendy delivers gruff, powerful lead vocals. With its
edgy rock beat, it's easy to imagine "Perfect Stranger" being
recorded by an all-girl rock band like The Donnas or Veruca Salt - or even The Runaways back in the day.
Like W&L
fans around the world, I wish the girls would record and tour more. It would be
great to see them hook up for a tour of small venues with another indie rock
group with a similarly devoted, if relatively small, following like
Cincinnati's Over the Rhine. It would be really cool to be able to drive 15
minutes from my house and see Wendy and Lisa perform at the Southern Theatre or
the LC Pavilion in downtown Columbus or the Newport Music Hall on campus.
I think Wendy
and Lisa are two of the most multitalented yet extremely underrated,
under-promoted and under-appreciated women in music. A lot of it has to do with
the fact that neither they themselves nor their eclectic music fit into an
easily-defined niche or category, and the narrow-minded suits at record labels
and radio stations don't know how to market them - Are they pop? R&B? Funk?
Indie rock? Or something in between? Their music is a combination of all of
the above, with a whole lot of other complex, subtle textures and layers
mixed in.
It's cool that
W&L do television and film scoring for shows like Showtime's "Nurse
Jackie" (for which they won an Emmy), the rom-com "Just
Wright" with Queen Latifah and Common and the new Fox drama "Touch" starring Kiefer Sutherland. But they've only released a handful
of studio albums. Many of their songs, like "If I Were Brave" from
1998's "Girl Bros.," are very upbeat and radio-friendly and deserve
more promotion and airplay.
W&L's 1987
self-titled debut album, with melancholy songs like "The Life" and
"Song About," got me through my brooding, awkward teen years. One of
the most memorable moments of my life was meeting them several years ago at an
event in L.A. and getting to tell them, "Your music made me feel less
alone in the world," to which Lisa replied with a heartfelt, "Thank
you for saying that."
It's hard to
believe, but the 30th anniversary of "Purple Rain" is coming up in
less than two years. Will Prince give us diehard fans what we crave and reunite
with the Revolution - Wendy and Lisa included - for a world tour? Anything's
possible... Miracles do happen.
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