Somehow, someway,
Ryan Cabrera became a star in 2004, as his debut album,
Take It All Away, peaked in the Billboard Top Ten with its two singles, "On the Way Down" and "True," climbing into the Top 20 and Top Ten, respectively. Part of it was due to his slick, youthful spin on earnest post-alternative mainstream pop/rock like
Third Eye Blind,
Matchbox Twenty, and
the Goo Goo Dolls (whose
Johnny Rzeznik co-produced
Take It All Away), but his popularity was due equally to his much-publicized doomed romance with pop tart
Ashlee Simpson. This got his name in the tabloids and his face on MTV's The Ashlee Simpson Show, which went a long way to giving him a personality that wasn't immediately apparent on his crisp, clean, pleasantly bland records. Because of this, some fans may feel the desire to interpret the songs on his quickly released second album,
You Stand Watching (it hit the streets 13 months after his debut), as a chronicle of his relationship with
Ashlee and its aftermath, but the songs not only don't hold up under such scrutiny, they're not designed to invite such an analysis. They're songs about love lost and won, targeted at teens but produced to appeal to their moms. This was true on
Take It All Away, but
You Stand Watching goes even further into the adult-pop breach and
Cabrera has nobody to blame but himself for this: not only does he co-write all 11 songs, but takes sole credit for the production, which downplays whatever harder edges
Rzeznik brought to the debut. Thanks to his fondness of post-grunge guitar pop, he winds up with a record that has a bit more muscle than
Clay Aiken -- which, honestly, isn't that hard to do -- but certainly manages to straddle the adult contemporary and teen pop worlds in a similar fashion. If anything,
Cabrera leans a little closer to the adult side of the fence: the sentiments in his music may be decidedly adolescent, but the polished, anthemic sound of
You Stand Watching was designed to have an all-ages appeal. Since
Cabrera does write his own material and delivers it with a simpering schoolboy whine, there is an impression that he's sincere about his tales of heartbreak, but that's undercut by the big, glossy sound of the record and his overwhelming ordinariness. These two qualities mean
You Stand Watching is far from being either bad or offensive -- it's too well-produced, professional, and pedestrian for that -- and despite the increased sense of safety and slickness, it will likely please fans of his first album since it pretty much delivers more of the same, yet there is nothing on this record to suggest that he has the skill of a real songwriter or the presence of a real star. He's just had the good fortune to be in the right place at the right time -- or, more specifically, to date the right person at the right time.