If you've maybe gotten a little tired of Scarlett Johansson — she only seems to get a little less appealing and a lot less talented with every movie, and at twenty-three, the number of movies she's been in is far greater than the number of years she's been on our planet — the good news is that she's gotten a hobby. The perhaps not so good news is that her new hobby is singing professionally. Johansson, who will be seen later this year in He's Just Not That Into You — a title that could have applied equally well to audience reactions to The Back Dahlia or The Nanny Diaries — is releasing an album in May. Anywhere I Lay My Head consists of ten Tom Waits covers and an original, which I'm guessing — I'm hoping — will kind of stand out from the rest of the album. Reporting in the UK Independent, David Usborne writes that Johansson promises that the album will have "a dreamy, other-worldly feel," kind of like this post. "It was a really, really sort of inspired process, and it was something I'd never done before," she said. Johansson's only previously recorded work was a version of "Summertime" that appeared on Unexpected Dreams: Songs from the Stars, a benefit record for the Los Angeles Philharmonic's "Music Matters" educational program that also featured musical performances by the likes of Lucy Lawless, Jennifer Garner, Victor Garber, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Ewan McGregor, Teri Hatcher, and Jeremy Irons, whose rendition of Bob Dylan's "To Make You Feel My Love" was hailed by one on-line writer as "less creepy than expected."
The new album was cut in Louisiana, with production by TV on the Radio's Dave Sitek and a crew of musicians that included members of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. If Johansson decides to do a follow-up, and if she really wants to shake things up, she should leave Tom Waits alone and do a concept album of versions of all the aching songs that various admirers and other horndogs have written about her. Scarlett Johansson singing "Scarlett Johansson, Why Don't You Love Me" by the Jai-Alai Savant and the tear-stained songbook of her ex-boyfriend Jack Atinoff, of Steel Train? Might be kind of funny. Of course, that's probably what she once thought about the script for Scoop.