Pepsi Music Blog
Chrisette Michele? No Doubt About It!
By Wed Jun 24, 2009 8:31pm PDT 66 Comments
Chrisette Michele and Gwen Stefani would not seem to fall into the "separated at birth" category... but should we go back and check the nativity records? Because Michele, one of our most celebrated and history-conscious young R&B singers, does feel an unlikely kinship with the ultimate modern rocker chick. After she stopped by the Yahoo! Music studios to reinterpret No Doubt's "Don't Speak" for an installment of Pepsi Music's Cover Art series, we asked Michele to ignore the instructions in the song title and speak to us at length about her Stefani fixation.
It all started tragically enough. "Tragic Kingdom was one of the first records I went to the store to buy with my own money," says the 26-year-old singer, waxing nostalgic about No Doubt's 1995 breakthrough disc. "I listened to it over and over, trying to emulate Gwen Stefani's vibrato. And that was a favorite song of mine for a long time, so I was really happy to do it on the show. Gwen is a little bit more of a rocker than me, Chrisette Michele, R&B/soul singer, so I thought it was cool I got to do it my way. I think Gwen and I both have a similar passion for lyrics. And aside from that incredible vibrato, she reminds me of even Ella Fitzgerald, just the way she has that jazzy quality and tone to her voice."
Some singers bring full bands into the studio for their Cover Art segments, but Michele was happy to have just a keyboard player along for the ride. "I always like to strip songs down as much as I can, to get to their bare essence," she says. "I think the words in that song are really special. And I always like to play around with my voice a little bit, so whenever I got the opportunity to just be nice and honest with the vocals and the keys, I do it."
Michele is known for her fondness for really, really retro singers--by which we mean the pre-Stefanian likes of Billie Holliday--so it's no surprise that "Don't Speak" sounds spookily like an old standard in her hands. But then, so does the other song she performed that day at the Yahoo! Studios: "Epiphany," the title track from her sophomore album, which debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard/SoundScan charts in May.
"I always think it's interesting how two songs that are polar-opposites can sound so similar when you change up the instruments," Michele says. "Over just the piano, these two songs became bittersweet ballads--almost in the same genre, which is cool." Fire up her lovely and raw new takes on "Don't Speak" and "Epiphany" back to back, and the breakup laments really do sound like they could have been written by the same disappointed spitfire. They're both hella good. Or should that be Ella good?
