Come On and Get the Minimum Before You Open up Your Eyes

I never understood why musicians do not add more cover songs to their albums. Instead they usually have a couple of good songs and the rest fillers. Back in the day you would see major acts fill out their album with songs made famous by other singers, some of which were great songwriters in their own right. You would think all these televised karaoke contestants would think, everybody knows me for singing other people songs, why not I add some to my first album, if not an entire album of covers. I am assuming the reason why this is rarely done anymore is why anyone does anything these days: money. It is probably cheaper to commission someone to write a new song than record an established hit. And of course if you write it yourself, you get to keep all the royalties.

Joss Stone actually bucked that trend on her debut album The Soul Sessions when the then teenager updated some soul songs (and one surprise track) from the sixties and seventies for a new millennium produced by soul legend Betty Wright to much effect. Coming just after the teen pop boom, Stone’s sultry throwback was a welcome change from the overproduced and over-autotunes tracks from her peers.

Four albums of new material would come next to mixed results as she tried to reboot her career a couple times (her third album was called Introducing Joss Stone while her fifth was called LP1). Almost a decade after her debut Joss Stone is releasing The Soul Sessions, Vol. 2 where she has dug through her crate of soul songs from the sixties and seventies (and one surprise track) bringing them into a new century. This time around Joss is tacking classics from Chi-Lites, Womack & Womack, Sylvia, The Dells, and The Casinos.

In the middle of all the old soul albums on her first album sat a smoothed out version of the garage rock of Fell in Love with a Girl by The White Stripes which Joss made it almost unrecognizable changing the genders and almost as good as the original. This time around she tried converting Broken Bells’s The High Road into a soul standard. Unfortunately this time it does not work as well, the original is already smoothed out and the weirdness of the task is what makes The Broken Bells version great, but Joss strips the song of any weirdness.

Really Volume 2 lacks the magic that the first one did with many of the songs drowned out by unnecessary organ. Joss’s version of Labi Siffre’s I Got The… is novel but only because it is interesting when the track transitions into the same funk line that Eminem sampled in My Name Is… Joss is at her best when she keeps it simplistic with love songs like The Love We Had (Stays on My Mind) and Then You Can Tell Me Goodbye.

Song to Download – Then You Can Tell Me Goodbye

The Soul Sessions, Volume 2 gets a on my Terror Alert Scale.