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Charlotte Sometimes
Posted by Rob Ortenzi on 07-Aug-08 @ 11:29 AM
HQ: New York, NYNOW PLAYING: Waves And The Both of Us (GEFFEN; geffen.com) WHY YOU SHOULD KNOW HER: Despite her sweet smile, sparkling voice and fondness for '50s housewife garb, Charlotte Sometimes might just kill a man. YOU LIKE? YOU'LL LIKE: Lily Allen, Kate Nash, Nelly Furtado STORY: Kelly Delaney Once upon a time (during a recent tour), there was a girl who stood at the pharmacy counter inside an Arkansas Wal-Mart and begged the pharmacist to fill her prescription before 2 p.m. so she could return to her convoy in time. Sadly, the pharmacist twanged that he couldn't help the girl. "Aw, fuck my life," sighed Charlotte Sometimes, betraying both her fairytale name (which she borrowed from the title of one of her favorite childhood books) and her deceivingly angelic appearance. It was a small, inconsequential moment in the life of the 20-year-old singer, but it was indicative of how easy it can be to misjudge Miss Sometimes. Her namesake (the one in the book by Penelope Farmer) found herself trapped in someone else's identity and struggled to return to her true self. Our Charlotte Sometimes discovered her true self in songwriting as a New Jersey teenager, puzzling her way through high school and looking for an emotional escape. Once, she thought that ballet would be the outlet. "When I started playing music, it was a totally different experience [from ballet]," she says. "I was the one who got to decide what I was singing and writing, but when I danced, someone else was telling me the routine." It was only a few months after Sometimes first picked up a guitar at age 14 that she began performing for audiences. Her classmates weren't quite sure what to make of the suddenly successful Sometimes, who released several homemade EPs before graduating--it was obvious that her life wasn't moving at the same pace. "I didn't need to feel connected to high school to feel like I mattered," she says. "I already felt like I mattered." With the ink on her diploma barely dry, she moved to New York City and enrolled at the prestigious New School University in Greenwich Village, where she adopted her moniker and began cultivating a new fan base with her biting sassiness juxtaposed over cherubic melodies--showcased throughout her debut full-length, Waves And The Both Of Us. The title track begins innocently with its hushed piano and guitar intro, but it quickly forays far from sweetness when Charlotte tells the listener, "I take off your shirt, you pull up my skirt." In "How I Could Just Kill A Man," Sometimes swipes the refrain from a Cypress Hill classic and redefines the word "lethal." "[I was going through a difficult breakup when I wrote it] and he actually did say to me, 'How could you kill me like this?' I said, 'Because I could just kill a man, that's how," In fact, maybe someone should write a fairytale based around this sentiment: "Instead of being gangsta by killing someone," poses Sometimes. "You can be gangsta with someone's heart." |
i love charlotte she is so awesome as well as her music!<3