Audra McDonald - build a bridge

Audra McDonald has a rich, dark-hued, well-trained voice and knows how to put across a song, as her new album, build a bridge (no caps) demonstrates. But there are some questions before we get to the 13 songs.

Song Number 7, "My Heart," by Neil Young, is not in the booklet; no explanation offered. Did Young not grant permission? For shame! Or have folks at Nonesuch Records no counting expertise beyond six? Or would another page have been too expensive? In that case, why have four pictures of Audra (two outside, two inside), when three would have done in a pinch. It's all very fancy: there are white, olive, dark green, tan, dark brown and deep red pages, most of them two-tone. There is black lettering and white. And once inside, we even get capital letters.

My bigger problem, however, is with the songs. Most of them are pop songs laboring under the delusion that they are art songs. This is confirmed by the chic absence of punctuation almost throughout.

A major undertaking, this, with Audra thanking 29 people on top of Mom, Dad, and Hubby and dedicating the disc to her granny. Some thanks seem a bit overzealous, but not so those of Doug Petty, producer and arranger, and Ted Sperling, co-producer.

We begin with "God Give Me Strength" by Burt Bacharach and Elvis Costello, for whose pretentious, dreary, repetition-riddled five minutes God might have given me some strength too. John Mayer's "My Stupid Mouth" is no better in lyric or melody.

More disturbing, given his talent, is "Build a Bridge" (this time with caps) by Adam Guettel. A rather grey tune, with confused words: is the speaker trying to build a bridge to the Other or battling the tide while swimming in it? The end, "Oh, yes/ I know," is an anticlimax, even though it contains that rarity, a comma. "Cradle and All," by Ricky Ian Gordon and that charming actress Jessica Molaskey, is a muddle: the missed person changes from "him" to "her" within four lines, which is too protean by half. And to whom is this lullaby being sung? Nellie McKay's more conventional "I Wanna Get Married" is musically pleasant enough, despite such lyrics as "I wanna pack cute little lunches/ For my Brady bunches/ Then read Danielle Steele." Worse yet is "I just want to bake a sugar cake for you," which was corn enough in Kern days, but at least wasn't followed by "To take to work in the morn." "Morn," in this day and age, and only for a slant rhyme with "warm"? But the nadir is reached with "I wanna hear the sweet tune/ Of Sally's little vroom-vroom/ As she zooms around my broom/ As I exhume the gloom/ Of my shallow life." Think that through if you can.

Adam Guettel's "Dividing Day" from his hit show The Light in the Piazza, is interesting musically, though "But I have dividing day" is pidgin English. I assume that "Was my cheek upon your chest," changed by Mcdonald to "your cheek upon my chest," is a tribute to her superior physical endowments.

Rufus Wainwright's "Damned Ladies" comprises a ludicrous litany of operatic heroines, including "Violetta keep your man locked up/ Or like Cio-Cio you will end up/ Burned by love or sickness," although, if anyone, Violetta might have been the one to lock up; and what has sickness to do with Cio-Cio, here to be deprived of both son and San? And what on earth is the meaning of "Oh Pamina got away from mama/ Before the age of Rambo Opera?"

Music and words are equally poor in Jane Kelly Williams's "Wonderful You," which stoops to "You're elevated/ Limitlessness/ How did you confiscate/ Foreverness," which strikes me as the limit.

Laura Nyro's unremarkable "To a Child" and "Tom Cat Goodbye" profit from even lesser surroundings; the latter contains lots of punctuation along with a huge overdose of reiteration, while missing some necessary context.

Something like that applies also to Joe Raposo's "Bein' Green," which is meaningless without its batrachian context and lacks, despite Raposo's aptitude elsewhere, much of a tune to boot.

Finally, Randy Newman's "I Think It's Going to Rain Today," heavy irony notwithstanding ("Human kindness is overflowing"), does achieve its aim as a melancholy mood piece. .