“I was like, wait a minute, [Jenny Lewis is] on Warner Bros., and she just made a record that sounds like the record I wanna make. But I’m being told by the same people that I can’t make a record that sounds like this. For some reason, no one could wrap their head around me making anything other than a teen pop album.”
Michelle Branch, SPIN
With her slew of anthemic teen pop-rock singles in the early 2000s - "Everywhere", "All You Wanted", "Goodbye to You", ″Are You Happy Now?″ - from her first two commercially successful albums Spirit Room (2001) and Hotel Paper (2003), it does not come as a surprise that many people have a specific idea of what a song from Arizona singer-songwriter Michelle Branch should sound like. Fourteen years after her last full-length album and seven years after her last overall release (2010's Everything Comes and Goes EP), Branch finally managed to seize the opportunity to take her aesthetic into her own hands with her third solo album Hopeless Romantic (2017).
The album's title track signals the arrival of her new, edgier, and more mature-sounding inclinations (even as her old preoccupations with matters of love, romance and intimacy remain). Her vocal delivery is more subdued and intimate than the unmistakable full-on belt she employed in her past hits, all the better to showcase the vulnerability and openness to all the emotional possibilities offered by romance, both good and bad:
'Underneath the sheets, I feel so wantedYou're the mystery that I am solvingEverything is dangerous when it's just the two of usJumping in over our headsNow I toss and turnNow, I only toss and turnBut will I ever learn?Boy, I never listenCause I'm a hopeless romanticWhen I should run for my lifeHoney, I don't understand itCause it's magic, but it's tragicI know you're gonna eat me aliveYou're gonna eat me alive'
Lyrics: Genius
The track was co-produced by Gus Seyffert (Beck, Sia) and Black Keys drummer Patrick Carney (Branch's present significant other), offering listeners with mid-tempo drums, guitars and haunting synths to signal her departure from her previous staunchly PG-rated lyrics (there certainly weren't any cannibal metaphors before). Branch’s new Nashville influences will undoubtedly thrill older listeners who fondly reminisce of having her pop-rock anthems as the soundtrack of their tumultuous teenage years, but it may not prove to be distinctive enough to stand apart from other artists who have already staked a contemporary claim in this aesthetic territory (e.g. Lana Del Rey, Banks).
With a little more time and sustained effort, however, Branch may be poised to captivate a new generation of music listeners with emotionally intelligent songs about those perennial themes: love, hearbreak, romantic hope, and romantic dejection.
