photo by Meg Wachter
Zooey Deschanel
Issue #36
The actress-singer proves with She & Him that there is more than one way to compel an audience
By Paula Crossfield
Published: June 1st, 2008 | 4:48pm
Zooey Deschanel walks up to the microphone and doesn’t say anything. Her smile is as wide as Texas, and when she opens her mouth seconds later to belt out one of the toe-tapping songs from Volume One, the album she released in March with M. Ward under the moniker She & Him, you know it isn’t stage fright that keeps her silent.
She is confident in the delivery of her lyrics, the result of her labor over years of being a closet songwriter, conjuring Loretta Lynn, Nancy Sinatra, or the Shirelles. To clarify her silence between songs, she’s brought along a few signs with her to Webster Hall, the downtown location of She & Him’s first sold-out show in New York, and Ward explains that Deschanel has lost her voice. One of her posters says, “You guys look great, really you do!” Another just says “Hi,” evidencing her deadpan comedy style. But from what I can tell, she isn’t lip-syncing like other movie starlets who’ve made their way to the stage. I imagine she’s saving her voice, aside from singing, for the mountains of publicity requests gathering around her (mine included). In my quest to reach her for an interview, I got swept around along with the torrent of seekers biding for her time. Managers and publicists minimized her schedule after she fell ill. Originally we had plans to do an in-person interview. That was canceled and changed to a phoner, and at the last minute, just a few days before deadline, the interview became an e-mail conversation. In just a matter of a couple of months, She & Him has grown into an eight-headed monster and threatens to take her acting career in a whole new direction.
Well, not a whole new direction. Deschanel has a cabaret act (If All the Stars Were Pretty Babies) in Los Angeles and has sung in movies such as Elf and last year’s Bridge To Terabithia. She was set to play Janis Joplin in a biopic that is currently on hold and has been singing as long as she can remember, only now it’s (mostly) her own words.
“I have always been attracted to old music,” she says a few days after her New York performance. “Growing up I always listened to oldies — I remember listening to a lot of Linda Ronstadt and Everly Brothers in the car with my mother when I was barely a toddler. They are still some of my favorite artists.”
There are sweet, delicate covers of the Beatles and Smokey Robinson on Volume One, and the songs she’s written are throwbacks to the girl groups of the ’60s, as well as jazz standards, country (note that hint of a southern belle twang) and ’70s pop. But while singing her own tunes live is a whole new experience for Deschanel, she insists that acting and songwriting have a lot in common. “I think both disciplines inform each other,” she says. “I think of both acting and songwriting as telling stories in different mediums. It’s been helpful to me to stretch myself to convey a story in a three-minute song or through a character for an hour-and-a-half film.”
After her debut in Mumford in 1999, she wasn’t sure acting would be her main preoccupation. That was until she was given a part in Almost Famous in 2000, as the main character’s rebellious older sister. After the success of that film, she began developing a full-fledged acting career, taking roles in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Failure To Launch with Sara Jessica Parker, and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford with Brad Pitt.
At Webster Hall, as one of 1,200 people in the crowd, I’m trying to glean something from her demeanor, a clue perhaps for why she is ailing. A friend who is a vocalist told me that newly minted professional singers often battle laryngitis when they are learning to wield their voice. Has she been practicing too much?
In the past month, she launched She & Him at South by Southwest, was on the set of Gigantic, an indie film she is starring in along side Paul Dano, and loaned her voice to a character on The Simpsons. And after the show in New York on April 22, She & Him performed (with Yo La Tengo backing them up) on Late Night With Conan O’Brian.
Her year isn’t going to slow down anytime soon. Fans of She & Him were ecstatic and bouncy, couples spooning, glitterati swaying, and college kids swooning as they watched the soundtrack to summer (I promise, just you wait) playing before them. And this was despite the previous night’s cancellation, which called for a venue change to accommodate the two nights of sold-out crowds, but didn’t dampen the mood. This begs the question: Will there be a proper tour between Deschanel’s & Ward’s other projects?
Aside from the music, Deschanel is starring in M. Night Shyamalan’s summer flick The Happening, a thriller of apocalyptic proportions, which is a step in a different direction for her. Recently wrapped is another comedy, a genre where she feels right at home, called Yes Man, in which she stars opposite a man who agrees to say yes to everything for a year, played by Jim Carrey. She also recently signed on to co-star in a film with Chloe Sevigny called Divorce Ranch, set to start filming in 2009.
We are guaranteed to see Deschanel on the big screen very soon, but we will have to wait and see if there’s more live music in her future. The indie darling has become big, very big. And there is no turning back from here.
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