A 19-year-old girl sang, “So if you’re listening, there’s so much more to me you haven’t seen,” and I fell in love. But there’s some question as to just whom I fell in love with, whether it was with the singer Ashlee Simpson herself or with a fiction she created, helped by her co-writers and producers. So if I want to—and I will, someday, just not today—there are a whole bunch of juicy issues about authorship and artifice that I could explore through her. But the fact is I’ve imprinted on Ashlee, and I’ve willfully decided that this creation (hers and John’s and Kara’s and Shelly’s), this “Ashlee Simpson,” isn’t just an artwork. It is her.
I recently got hold of the first several episodes of her MTV reality show from 2004, and though the show covers the making of her first album, its theme actually is An Ordinary Girl Gets Her First Apartment. Which is to say it’s about her trying to grow up while still being a fun girl and throwing parties and snit-fits and getting her heart broken and her hair fixed. So in a subtle way it’s about the artistry of being a young woman. But frustratingly for me it’s not about the creative process of making a record. So you see Ashlee singing, you get snippets of her and producer/writer John Shanks working on songs, you see a clip of Kara DioGuardi coaching her through a difficult part of “Pieces Of Me,” but you don’t see actual decisions being made, this pitch rather than that pitch, this timbre rather than some other, this word here, that word there. What is clear is that the basic idea for a song’s lyrics will be Ashlee’s; but as for who wrote which specific words and why, no info.
(Also, if this is an issue for you: Ashlee can sing. When she was caught lip-synching on Saturday Night Live, she was certainly being dishonest—the “live” in Saturday Night Live means something, and she should have just cancelled—but she chose to lip-synch because she had a wrecked throat that night. She can sing very well, though some days are shakier than others.)
There’s a moment in Episode 4 that interests me because I don’t know how to read it. Ashlee’s telling John about how she tried out for an acting job but what was wanted was a Britney Spears type, so she got turned down. “Because you’re reflective, and you’re sad, and you’re somber,” says John. And I can’t tell if this is an instance of John teasing her—which he’s done a number of times—or if he’s dead serious, right on point. It makes sense as teasing because, while Ashlee can get sad, she’s the opposite of somber. At least on camera, she’s a perpetual scamp, a goofball, an instigator.
Yet the album itself, Autobiography, is one of the most reflective I’ve ever heard—not reflective in the sense of having slow, brooding songs that signify “reflection.” Rather, a later line will reverse one from earlier in a song, or wording and ideas from one song will reappear in another or come out of a different character’s mouth. So one thought sheds light on another, events refract into different meanings.
In Episode 1, Josh, her boyfriend, comes to take his stuff away. So he’s breaking up with her, right? Ashlee’s trying to write a song about all this, what’s going wrong with the two of them. She explains the song concept as “We’re already beautiful,” which seems an odd way to conceptualize a bust-up. Rather opaque, though maybe it’s a stand-in for some homily about the need to accept the beauty that life offers. But then, suddenly, there’s a line that intensifies everything. “You can’t push a river, you can’t make me fall, but you can make me unreachable.” It’s a common saying, you can’t hurry a river, you’ve got to practice patience, but then there’s Ashlee falling, or not falling (down? in love?). And then she’s far away, separated by an immense sadness.
There’s a totally hilarious moment in “Love Me for Me” where she goes “oh” in a coquettish but loud meow. Exemplary line: “And when you’re crawling over broken glass to get to me/That’s when I’ll let you stay.” Earlier on she’d shouted “Stay here! Get out!” in an excellent attempt to push the river from both ends at once. After having already declared herself “perfect” (analogue to “we’re already beautiful”?), she dispenses this piece of wisdom: “I’m mixed up. So what? Yeah, you want me, so you’re messed up, too.” So that’s perfection: being mixed-up and messed-up in 25 different directions. You can’t push a river, but you can embrace a whirlpool.
Her singing is a fierce growl and a cute pout, grating and ingratiating at the same time, and she pulls it off, a people-pleaser who’s actually pleasing.
She told Elle magazine that at age 10 her favorite songs were The Beatles’ “Let It Be” and Alanis Morissette’s “You Learn.” Now, I think Ashlee’s written 20 songs that are better than either of those, but I can imagine those two songs worked for her because they ran counter to her nature. Self-acceptance didn’t come easy, and gleaning knowledge from sadness and heartbreak was a desperate psychological necessity.
In her one big hit, “Pieces Of Me,” she’s full of joy and incredulity that the guy is actually going to take her whole, the entire mixed-up package—incredulous because she doesn’t expect this and doesn’t trust it.
“So if you’re listening, there’s so much more to me you haven’t seen.” There’s heart-yanking vulnerability in this line, but also great chutzpah, a complete certainty that there’s Something. Here. To. See. Damn it! But who’s to say anyone is listening?
That’s from “Shadow,” a song I love beyond sanity. I love it when it’s savage, I love it when it’s warm, I love it when it’s childish, I love it when it’s clumsy. It’s got one of the great botched lines in history—what she means is “I’m finally free from my chains,” but what she actually sings is “My chains are finally free,” in a loud ringing voice. (Teenagers of the world give up! You have nothing to free but your chains!) Um, SPOILERS. If you’ve never heard “Shadow,” stop reading and go to Launch Yahoo or to AOL Music and stream the song. Okay, good. So gleaning knowledge from sadness and heartbreak was a desperate psychological necessity because something was wrong in her family. “I was stuck inside a broken life that I couldn’t wish away” isn’t just about a 6-year-old, it sounds like it was written by a 6-year-old. What sets this song off from teen pop’s other family-drama songs, though, isn’t that Ashlee ultimately wants reconciliation—so do Pink and Kelly and Lindsay—but that she puts a strong analytic mind to the process. The Elle interviewer told Ashlee that it was interesting that Ashlee’s dad had been both a Baptist minister and an adolescent psychologist. Ashlee sidestepped the implications (she said something about her father working hard so he could buy nice things for his children), but the thought that jumped at me was, “Ashlee is her father’s daughter.” The wording is ungainly, but the psychology is clear: “Oh, I love you now, ’cause now I realize, that it’s safe outside to come alive in my identity.” So this isn’t just a teenager proclaiming her identity, it’s her telling us what’s at stake: If she doesn’t find herself, she doesn’t get to love her family back. And this isn’t just psychological necessity, it’s a moral imperative. Ashlee uses images of light and dark, blindness and sight, day and night, sleep and, well, truth. Because waking from her nightmare means to see truly—that is, with love.
Except the song doesn’t give love an easy victory, in fact may not give it a victory at all. Ashlee does a brilliant job of having her cake and eating it, too, making us pity her and then telling us not to feel sorry for her. The song’s uneasiness keeps it alive. She sings, “Oh my life is good, I got more than anyone should,” but this is inherently unstable, with no way to align the “good” and the “should.” And my guess is what stands out in most listeners’ minds isn’t the happy ending but the angry road along the way, Ashlee absolutely delivering the whipcracks and knife-slashes, bearing down on the words: “Living in the shadow of someone else’s dream.”
“Say Goodbye,” a complicated song at the end of Ashlee’s generally less-complicated second album, has the saddest, most generous break-up line: “Maybe you don’t/Love me/Like I/Love you baby/’Cause the broken in you doesn’t make me run.” Nineteen words, one image, several abstractions, and somehow an intricate story is told completely; you don’t even have to know the rest of the song. As my friend Tim Finney points out, Ashlee’s telling the guy that it’s okay to be broken but that she doesn’t feel he allowed her her brokenness in turn, so they have a different sense of what was required in a relationship and therefore the relationship itself is beyond repair.
So that’s Ashlee’s career arc so far, after the SNL and Orange Bowl debacles, and half-filled concert halls, Ashlee ultimately more accepting than accepted.
But I won’t leave it on that note, since I don’t think that’s the real story. My favorite Ashlee song is actually the riotously funny “La La,” where the line “I feel safe with you, I can be myself tonight” means she can act out dominant-submissive sex fantasies, and “I like it better when it hurts” is a cry of joyous life.
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