Send "Betty Wright " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Popmatters |
 Betty Wright has some good ideas, but tries to hard to update her sound.Betty Wright begins her latest album, Betty Wright: The Movie, with a song titled “Old Songs”. It’s built around a mean groove – funky bass, smooth guitars – and it contains a blatant plea to the listener: “Old songs / old songs / old records / and old memories / 8 tracks / takin’ it back / to the old songs.” After making this naked statement about her own relevance and authenticity to the audience, you would expect Ms. Wright to pump out a set of jams along the lines of her late ‘60s, early ‘70s output that features tight little vessels of soul and funk. Instead, Betty Wright does an odd thing: she sings “When you 35 or 40 / and you’re chilling with your shorty.” This is never a sentence she would’ve uttered in 1972. That’s not inherently a bad thing – I’m all for changing with the times and staying abreast of the current lingo – but it undermines the whole premise of Wright’s song almost as soon as she establishes it. This is just the opening song on the album, but it illustrates all the troubles Wright has throughout Betty Wright: The Movie. Despite her status as a true soul survivor—and a woman who wrote a damn good hit in 1972—she makes too much of an effort to be “modern,” and moves too far from the stuff she does well. To update her sound, Wright hooks up with several rappers. She chooses The Roots as her backing band, a cagey move which attempts to straddle the line between new cred and old, since The Roots (drummer ?uestlove in particular) have many connections to soul-oriented groups – for example, ?uestlove played drums on Al Green’s last album – while also maintaining a reputation as a hard-hitting rap group. The Roots do an admirable job instrumentally. The grooves are pristine, the guitar especially gets a lot more play than it has on recent Roots records, and the rhythm section is formidable. However, the inclusion of guest verses from rappers doesn’t work out as well. The addition of rappers is not in itself bad—the combination of soulful singing and fearsome rapping has led to countless great songs. But for Wright, it feels forced. “Real Woman”, the second song on the album, begins wonderfully: wah-wah backing guitar and a precise lead that sounds a bit like the riff James Brown made into “Papa Don’t Take No Mess”. Snoop Dog pops in near the end – he appeared on Mayer Hawthorne’s new album as well – and his verse is fine, but it’s unnecessary, an afterthought. “Grapes On A Vine” begins with gentle guitar picking that works great as the backdrop to Wright’s vocals and melancholy backing “oohs.” But then Wright mashes this gorgeous opening with fuzz riffage. Lil’ Wayne shows up to rap over extended power guitar in complete disregard of the tender, reverential opening. The whole thing begins to sound foolish. ...full text |
| Allmusic |
| Betty Wright: The Movie is this Miami soul legend’s first album since 2001’s Fit for a King, but it’s hardly a return. During Wright’s decade away from making her own records, she was busy helping others -- including Kelly Clarkson, Joss Stone, Diddy, Keyshia Cole, and Lil Wayne -- as a songwriter, arranger, producer, and background vocalist. Here, she links up with the intrepid Roots crew and several supplemental session musicians, and she wrangles complementary appearances from Stone and the tremendously underappreciated Lenny Williams, as well as disruptive interjections from Lil Wayne and Snoop Dogg. Most of the songs were either written or co-written by Angelo Morris, who has been collaborating with Wright since the late ‘80s. It’s Wright’s best-sounding album since her self-titled 1981 release for Epic, with her backing band emulating vintage soul one moment and switching it up for more modern (and wholly appropriate) sounds the next. Wright sounds terrific, navigating through the upbeat, attitudinal jams and slower, romantic cuts with finesse and strength....full text |
| Latimesblogs |
| You can understand Betty Wright’s investment in a tune like “Old Songs,” the golden-days encomium that opens her first studio album since 2001. A longtime R&B fixture who’s never quite managed to break into the mainstream, Wright has for years complemented her work as an artist with production and vocal-coach gigs with the likes of Janet Jackson and Joss Stone; old songs and her proximity to them are more or less where Wright’s professional leverage lies. As sensible as it may be, the priggish nostalgia of “Old Songs” — in which she admonishes younger singers who don’t write their own material — is still a bummer to behold. Mercifully, Wright dials down the schoolmarm vibe elsewhere on “Betty Wright: The Movie,” for which she recruited the Roots as a backing band. (The Philadelphia combo performed a similar task on Al Green’s excellent 2008 disc, “Lay It Down.”) Yet the entire record feels suffused with longing for an earlier era — or perhaps, befitting Wright’s lengthy career, several earlier eras: In “Tonight Again” she revives the plush sound of mid-’70s quiet storm, while “In the Middle of the Game (Don’t Change the Play)” floats atop a Chic-style disco-soul groove. Lil Wayne and Snoop Dogg’s cameos in “Grapes on a Vine” and “Real Woman,” respectively, seem designed to connect the singer with hip-hop fans who’ve unwittingly heard her music in sampled form. In both cases, though, the rappers bend toward Wright, not vice versa....full text |
Betty Wright lyrics
|
| |||||||
