-- by Gil Kaufman
If you name your debut single "Dumb Girls," you’d better have the smarts and/or confidence to back it up. Luckily, pop newcomer Lucy Woodward appears to have both.
Born in England and raised in New York City, the singer with runway looks and a sultry voice paid her dues scooping Cherry Garcia at Ben & Jerry’s, playing the graveyard slot at open mic nights and singing jingles while pursuing her dreams of stardom.
On her debut album, While You Can, 25-year-old Woodward — who looks like a glamorized Donnas-style rocker and sounds like a grown up Avril Lavigne, pours her frustration and confidence, built up over years of pavement-pounding, into pop soul nuggets like "What’s Good For Me," on which she sings, "Without much hope, just blind ambition/ Pretending that there’s nothing missing/ I always kept believing."
"I always knew there was no other option — you put all your eggs in one basket," said Woodward of her ambitions for stardom. "There was no backup plan. Music was always how ... you dealt with every emotion. Before school, after school — if you’re hungry ... you practiced. It was always about music."
Luckily for Woodward, she had the chops to back up her make-it-or-break-it attitude. Her 11-track LP, a modern pop production that puts a grown-up spin on teen pop, is a self-assured collection of songs about the wreckage of love and the importance of always giving it your best shot, even if it means getting stepped on in the process.
The singer's itinerant, bohemian childhood — she was born in England and raised in Amsterdam and New York — fueled her musical ambitions. Summers were spent listening to classical music while visiting her composer/conductor father in Holland, while the rest of the year she picked up pointers about how to seduce audiences from her mother, an opera singer and belly dancer.
"We moved to America when I was 5," she said. "[My mom was a] single mother trying to make ends meet, and she learned how to belly dance in Amsterdam when we lived there." Though her mom tried to teach her 9-year-old daughter the art of belly dancing, Woodward preferred ballet, voice lessons and practicing classical music on the piano and flute. Meanwhile, she absorbed the music of such soul legends as Aretha Franklin, Bill Withers, Stevie Wonder and Michael Jackson, mixed with plenty of Led Zeppelin and the Beatles.
When no baby sitter was available, Woodward and her younger brother would accompany their mother to gigs in rural Westchester County and sit in a booth, munching on baklava while she performed. "She was like the big mysterious dancer with the eyes and makeup and hair," Woodward said. "It was very glamorous. It was cool to watch."
While most kids her age were busy playing video games or ditching school to make out, Woodward started voice lessons at 14 and quickly moved on to performing in coffeehouses, doing voice-overs for commercials, recording demos and playing with cover bands. The ambitious teen learned an important lesson about humility when she sat in on weekly Sunday night jam sessions at New York’s legendary Bitter End nightclub. "You come in and get up onstage," she said. "Someone’s playing the blues, and you just get up and sing. That’s how you learn ... [by] making a fool out of yourself, basically."
Another outlet for Woodward was a well-established biweekly New York songwriters circle where she tested new songs and got valuable input from her fellow aspiring singer/songwriters. "Everyone sings ... and you talk about your song and how you wrote it or what inspired it," she said. Woodward's hands-on experience helped her co-write such tracks as "Blindsided," a love song to her adopted hometown and the haunting effect it has on the lovelorn, and "Standing," a funky rock-soul ballad about ignoring the allure of materialism and staying true to your inner voice.
The singer is in good company on many of the album’s tracks, which feature
such veteran musicians as drummers Kenny Aronoff (John Mellencamp) and Abe
Laboriel Jr. (Vanessa Carlton), bassists Pino Palladino (the Who) and Mike
Elizondo (Eminem), and keyboardist Patrick Warren (Macy Gray), as well as
co-writers who’ve penned songs for everyone from Kiss to O-Town, Brandy and Avril Lavigne.
Woodward’s sass and determination is summed up by "Dumb Girls," a single that is climbing the radio charts, and on which she sings, "I never believed it could happen to me/ Something like this only happens to dumb girls," over a sinewy Led Zeppelin beat. Taking her spunky attitude out on the track, Woodward chides herself for falling in love too hard, even as she vows not to get burned again.
Though she professes to be an "e-mail girl," but totally not an "Internet girl," before "Dumb Girls" hit radio, Woodward already had a sizable hit thanks to the AOL Music site, on which the song streamed more than half a million times earlier this year, according to her label.
"I can’t foresee the future. I have no idea what’s gonna happen, you know?" she said. "It’s a lot of ups and downs, but I know that it comes down to spreading the love."
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