I am not much into making niche lists, but if I were to make a list of the best pop albums of last decade, The Spirit Room by Michelle Branch would have topped that list. Not since Hootie and the Blowfish’s Cracked Rear View was there an album full of radio ready gems from start to finish. But I didn’t make such a list, so instead it will have to settle for number five on my list of The 100 Greatest Albums of the 00’s and this month’s induction into the Scooter Hall of Fame.
Even though every track on The Spirit Room was pop goodness, Everywhere still stood out as the best the album had to offer. With an acoustic intro, crunchy guitars and pseudo religious undertones, the song had a chorus that just screamed to be screamed along with whenever the song came on the radio (possibly with the windows up if you were a dude). Another standout was the token power balled Goodbye to You which was great by itself, but will forever be linked to the Buffy the Vampire Slayer scene Branch cameod in for me.
Though the same age as Taylor Swift when she recorded her first album, Michelle doesn’t suffer from the high school sophomore poetry class lyrics that stricken Taylor’s first (and second) album. Sure songs like You Get Me (which was the theme to the underappreciated Sorority Life) bordered on girly cheesy with lines like “You’ve seen my secret garden where all of my flowers grow,” but most songs like Everywhere were wise beyond the seventeen years she had lived up to that point. Like Something to Sleep To, is a billowing song about longing that would have sounded less moving in the hand of others her age.
With most of The Sprit Room of the purely pop persuasion, it does end on a different not with Drop in the Ocean which sounded more like something that would be championed on an indie blog these days than a pop album in the early 00’s. At the time I was hoping that would be something we would hear more from Branch, but after one more album, she went country in the middle of the decade. Here’s hoping she finds her way back to her roots sometime this decade.
