The Love Hate Society: The Enduring Bad Luck of Carly Smithson

From Carly Smithson's MySpace page.

Editor's note: Brian Adams Boone, serving as an occasional contributor to TSB this summer, writes about pop culture and music at LoveHateSociety.com. His first book, I Love Music/I Hate Music will be released by Penguin/Perigee Books in 2011.

This is Carly Hennessy, also known as Carly Smithson. A pop and rock singer of some talent with agreeable looks (some talent and agreeable looks being gateways into stardom), she was born in Ireland, where she dabbled in acting and modeling and starred in an international touring version of Les Miserables.

At age 15, she moved to Los Angeles to join the insatiable, innocence-eating, soul-killing, and blame-shifting shit monster that is the major label music industry. She recorded a demo that reflected her theatrical roots (i.e. show-tuney) and MCA Records signed her in early 1999. MCA thought they could shape her into a teen pop star, which was the style at the time.

It took a year, but Hennessy recorded two-thirds of what she thought was the album MCA wanted, but it was still too Broadway, too torch songy, too Streisand. She was young, MCA thought, so she should sing the kind of ridiculous music other kids her age were into, not the kind of music she liked to sing, wanted to sing, and was trained to sing, the music upon which she so excelled that she was signed by MCA Records, which somehow wasn't good enough for MCA Records.

So they sent her back to the studio and assigned her the producing/songwriting duo of Gregg Alexander and Danielle Brisebois. About a year earlier--when Hennessy had been signed by MCA--those two had formed the core of New Radicals, a one-hit wonder in 1998 with the pop classic "You Get What You Give." Immediately after, Alexander split up the band to focus on production and songwriting. (Brisebois, by the way, had been a minor child star like Hennessy, appearing as the little girl brought on to renew interest in the latter years of All in the Family in the late '70s.)

A year later, in early 2001, Alexander, Brisebois, and Hennessy handed in a finished album to MCA, who admitted that though it sounded a bit more contemporary (contemporary meaning TRL, circa 1999), it still wasn't exactly what they'd wanted. But they released two songs to radio anyway: "I'm Gonna Blow Your Mind" and "Beautiful You."

It didn't really matter if it was teen poppy enough or not, because that fad was pretty much dead by the summer of 2001. Britney Spears was working with the Neptunes, the Backstreet Boys had been put on hiatus, and *NSYNC was no longer writing dance pop about puppy love and proms, but self-reflexive, surefire career killers about the nature and difficulty of celebrity. Willa Ford returned to the Dollhouse.

Carly Hennessy's Ultimate High was finally released in November 2001 after two and a half years of recording, at an expense of $2 million to MCA Records. But since the pre-release radio singles had made almost no major playlists around the country and hadn't charted on any of the Billboard charts, record store interest was tepid, and few orders were put in for Ultimate High. Total sales: about 290 copies. Two hundred and ninety copies. Compare this to the gold standard for low sales yardsticks:Kevin Federline's Playing With Fire. K-Fed sold 16,000, meaning that for every one person who bought Ultimate High, about fifty-five bought a rap album by Britney Spears' now-fat ex-husband.

Hennessy, a pariah in the music industry due to the music industry's massively mismanaged handling of her and her talent, and because she had one of the worst major label debuts of all time, took some time off from the music industry. Or rather, she started tending bar and married a guy whose last name was Smithson. In 2006, the newly christened Carly Smithson gave pro music another try and tried out for American Idol in Las Vegas. Due to her well honed professionalism and ability to put up with the low-paying, high-promise, world of the record industry, for which American Idol is a loyal serf, Smithson easily made it to the Hollywood round. But she couldn't get her American work visa renewed in time. Smithson was kicked off the show.

In 2008, Smithson tried out for American Idol again. This time, she easily advanced to the finals, until somebody dug up the fact that she wasn't exactly an undiscovered amateur--an implicit, but never stated condition of the talent show. Many fans and music writers suggested that Smithson was a ringer, that the show was fixed because she had received music industry polish and because judge Randy Jackson had even worked at MCA when they were dicking around Carly Hennessy. The scandal blew over when Smithson ultimately finished the show in sixth place, alongside other contestants who'd also released albums, including winner David Cook.

On May 11, Smithson's new band We Are the Fallen released its debut album, Tear the World Down. We Are the Fallen is a band who, with the exception of Smithson, is made up entirely of guys who quit the inexplicably successful goth Christian pop band Evanescence due to the extremely nasty and draconian behavior of lead singer Amy Lee. We Are the Fallen is a snide reference to Fallen, Evanescence's first album. Amy Lee's bad luck, or what have you, is Smithson's gain. Like Smithson's other projects, it was seemingly cursed and failed due to no fault of her own. Because Tear the World Down debuted at #33 on the album chart and quickly faded away, which is, strangely enough, the definition of "evanescence."

 

We Are the Fallen play the Showbox SoDo this Saturday, along with Saving Abel, American Bang, Taddy Porter, and Sugar Red Drive.