‘Introducing Joss Stone’: A Pop Star Comes Into Her Own
For the first time, this supremely accomplished vocalist was able to see her creative vision come to life properly. What a pleasure it is to hear.
Joss Stone was only 19 when she released Introducing Joss Stone – her third album, confusingly enough – but she already exuded what Rolling Stone termed “divatude.” It wasn’t that the success of her first two records, The Soul Sessions and Mind Body & Soul, had bred arrogance (though it easily might have, given that the first had sold 7 million copies and the second 2 million). The divatude stemmed from a newfound confidence: she was now in charge of her music, to the point of landing an “executive producer” credit on the sleeve.
Stone had spent the four years since her 2003 debut discovering who she was. Her label initially saw her as Southwest England’s answer to Christina Aguilera, while she herself thought her big, heated voice was made for Memphis soul. Introducing was where she fine-tuned her musical identity. Thus the title: “[W]hen I say Introducing Joss Stone, it’s, like, ‘Finally, now they’ve given me the chance to actually create a piece of art, to create an album that has a start, a middle and a finish’,” she said, just after its March 9, 2007 release. Her positivity wasn’t misplaced. A week later, having sold 118,000 copies, the record was No.2 in the Billboard chart – her best performance in the US to date.
The fact was, by then she’d more or less disowned her first two albums. The debut, though showing what she could do with a rumbustious rare-soul groove, was comprised solely of covers; the second had been rushed. Of them, she said, “You just weren’t hearing my vision.” For this third record, she made sure that her vision was clearly articulated.
Listen to Introducing Joss Stone now.
Decamping to the Caribbean early in 2006, she wrote 60 songs in Barbados, and recorded them in the Bahamas with producer Raphael Saadiq, then hot off working with Mary J. Blige and Kelis. “She was definitely changing, flipping the script,” he said, looking back on the process in the documentary Introducing Joss Stone: Album Autopsy. Between them, they made something different from the earlier LPs. It was an album that presented her not as a retro-queen but as a girl of the 2000s. For the first time, there was a crisp digital sheen and hip hop influences, overseen by Saadiq and an all-American team that included Grammy-winning duo Bobby Ozuna and Glenn Standridge. At times, Saadiq had to persuade her to try his ideas – she wasn’t sold on “Arms Of My Baby”’s muscular beat and salsa break, for example, but as soon as strings were added, she loved it. The track is about Beau Dozier, then her recently-ex boyfriend, which also represented a departure from her previous work. The first two albums sounded like the work of a teenager with a crush; this record, marinated in real melancholy (not to mention real lust), came from a more experienced soul.
Lust? There’s definitely some of that. On the funky swagger of “Headturner” she tells a man why he’s lucky to be with her, and saucily slips in a line from “Respect” while she’s at it: “Emotional, I got it/Sexual, I got it/Spiritual, God knows I got it/What you want, baby, I got it.” But that pales next to Introducing’s first single, “Tell Me ‘Bout It,” which opens with a lubricious exchange between Stone and Saadiq: “Joss, how much lovin’ do you need?/Do you need it once a day, twice a day, three times a day, four times a day?” A laughing Joss replies, “I need a little lovin’ at least two times a day/So when I call ya, boy, you better run here right away.” Steamy…though you might wonder at the newly-minted Americanness of what used to be a Devon accent.
Elsewhere, there’s turntable scratching, raps from Common and Lauryn Hill – the Fugee empress’s first guest appearance since 1998 – and a general air of musicianship, purpose, and fun. Especially fun: for the first time, this supremely accomplished vocalist sounds 19 years old, and what a pleasure it is to hear.
