The Sellout

Gray still wants some more

The Sellout is a new album by the Grammy winning singer Macy Gray. She is not used to pampering her listeners with a flood of studio releases, offering presents three or four years apart. Usually, such misbehavior is forgiven if the albums prove worth waiting. So far, Gray has not left her audience dissatisfied with her song-writing or performing results. Macy’s career began gloriously. In 1999, she delivered a debut CD called On How Life Is that earned her a Grammy and sold tremendous numbers of copies. Critics and music lovers praised the singer’s vocal abilities and authoring potential. However, as time went by, Macy’s fame regressed. Now, she has a big goal in front of her with the album The Sellout: the singer will try to preserve a place among the leading figures of the present day pop-music scene. The making of The Sellout took place in the US and lasted through the entire year of 2009. As a result, the performer is ready to present twelve totally new songs that disclose those features of her style that we are well aware of.

Sweet music and serious verses

Macy Gray’s supporters cherish her efforts on making songs with easily perceptible music and difficult, sometimes even gloomy lyrics. For instance, on her previous albums, the singer used to speculate on the issue of humans killing humans and reasons causing them to do it. This topic was later developed on The Sellout in the track Stalker. Speaking about the CD’s most brilliant moments, we can not avoid mentioning the amazing single Beauty In The World and the soul-pop track Lately. Just like before, Macy Gray rest her hopes in the listener’s desire and ability to think over the messages of her songs. She finds stories for the music in a wide range of sources and enhances them to the shape of true hits as she did this to That Man, a song about looking for an ideal man. The Sellout proves the point that the singer is eager and capable to cooperate successfully with musicians from various parts of the music world. She sang with Bobby Brown to make a gorgeous ballad named Real Love, and teamed up with the guitarist Slash to record Kissed It.

More than another pop music album

The title, the cover, the track-listing and the duration of The Sellout might be constituents to form an effect of sarcasm or parody to the industry of pop music. Naming her studio work like this, decorating the folder with her beautifully dressed self standing behind the microphone, and offering a dozen of songs lasting forty five minutes, Macy Gray is saying to us: ‘Here is one more portion of pop stuff to you’. Yet those who are familiar with the material she writes and performs know that the format of popular music is applied to deliver a product for an attentive and considerate listener. While commenting on the new CD, Gray confessed that The Sellout is a story of how she found herself amidst the complex and twisted realm of music business. After more than ten years of singing on the stage and recording in the studio, the singer has taken her time to meet many people, try numerous sorts of music and study a great variety of problems she is concerned with. This is the time when she has a perfect idea of how her songs should sound, who she feels most comfortable to work with and what Macy Gray her massive audience wants to see and hear.