Sandi Thom
Smile…It Confuses People
(Columbia)
The energetic UK singer has already clicked at home with “I Wish I was a Punk Rocker with Flowers in my Hair.” In it, she laments the prominence of accountants and computers, and longs for a time “when we didn’t know everything.” In your face, Google! Where Zager & Evans’s “In the Year 2525” imagined a heavily medicated future and ELO’s Time foresaw how sweet the past would look, Thom uses a hootenanny tempo and selective nostalgia to show what is lost in a generation. A distaste for the car burns in “When Horsepower Meant What it Said.” “Time catches everyone” is another lyric that sticks. Her breezy worldview distinguishes Thom.
—Doug Taylor
This article appears in Dec 6-12, 2007.
