Merely eyeing the sleeve and scanning the songwriting credits, it appears likely that
Nikki Jean's
Pennies in a Jar is a sample-heavy nostalgia trip through classic ‘60s and early-‘70s pop and soul (with a little country), maybe with a modernized hip-hop spin on it. That’s not the case. It does sound like a nostalgia trip, but all the material is new, written by the twenty-something
Nikki Jean alongside a Grammy-baiting list of songwriting legends.
Thom Bell,
Luigi Creatore,
Lamont Dozier,
Burt Bacharach,
Jeff Barry,
Carole King,
Bobby Braddock,
Paul Williams,
Jimmy Webb,
Barry Mann and
Cynthia Weil, and
Carly Simon were all visited by
Nikki Jean, who took the songs to producers
Sam Hollander and
Dave Katz and a set of session musicians. It sounds like some kind of jackpot-fantasy American Idol working vacation. The album was nearing completion when Columbia dropped the artist, allegedly telling her “Nobody cares about these writers,” possibly unaware that another artist on the roster,
Raphael Saadiq, was in the process of making a second album that emulated the work of those very writers. More significantly, this is the type of thing
Nikki Jean -- a music nerd with a lithe, quietly potent voice -- should be doing, and the S-Curve label, which rescued the project, was sensible enough to see that. Guest verses from
Lupe Fiasco and
Black Thought excepted, the album is a throwback, and each song gets an appropriately classicist backdrop, from the pedal steel and strings on “How to Unring a Bell” (written with
Bell), to the slow-motion dream world sound of “Pennies in a Jar” (
Bacharach). Taking the music on its own, divorced of context -- without considering the elder songwriters’ overwhelming collective body of work -- is close to impossible, but it’s very easy to enjoy, voiced by a remarkably refined artist who is neither squarely R&B nor pop, certainly worthy of being granted quality material co-written by some of her heroes. The icing is “Steel and Feathers (Don’t Ever),” a gospel/country devotional left unfinished for 30 years until its writer,
Bob Dylan, allowed
Nikki Jean to complete and record it. ~ Andy Kellman