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Willa Ford Toasts Girl Power
Singer's sexy second album due this
winter
On her second album, tentatively
titled Sexysexobsessive and due early
next year, Willa Ford mixes Christina
Aguilera's dance-influenced raunch
with Pink's confessional pop. The
set's first single, "A Toast
to Men," transforms a salty sorority
chant into a female-empowerment anthem.
"I was hanging out at a sorority
party with some friends," Ford
says, "and I heard these girls
raise their glasses and do this chant.
It was a no-brainer. I had to do a
song about it." The taunt goes:
"Here's to the men we love/Here's
to the men who love us/Fuck the men,
let's drink to us."
I wasn't even sure my label would
release a song that racy," says
the twenty-two-year-old Ford. "It's
about a bunch of chicks dancing and
getting it on in a no-boys-allowed
situation."
Ford spent more than two years writing
and recording the new album, an eternity
in teen pop. Now she's afraid that
her time out of the spotlight -- during
which she "hung out in her New
York hotel room playing guitar and
frequented Punk Rock Karaoke night
at a Lower East Site nightclub"
-- means she might have waited too
long to follow up her hit "I
Wanna Be Bad," from 2001's Willa
Was Here.
"I was part of the revolution,
as far as changing the way people
think of pop music," she says.
"I wanted it to be sexy and fierce
and be OK to say the word 'fuck.'
I just needed some time to get out
of it and figure out what the fuck
was going on."
Ford wrote the new album by putting
herself in the shoes of Marilyn Monroe
and imagining what it would feel like
to turn so many men on. On "Who
I Am, Who Am I," she plays with
gender roles and questions the divisions
between gay and straight. On "Into
My Bed," she relates a fictional
account of a prostitute's life that
was inspired by her own feelings of
vulnerability as a teen trying to
break into the music business. "It's
deep, but very sexual," she says.
"I felt violated when I was younger
and dumber. I felt I was used as Willa
Ford, sexpot to everyone."
One of the album's more emotional
tracks, "Cry," is about
a boy Ford dated. "He was so
closed down I couldn't get him to
open up," she says, "so
I had to kiss that boy and make him
cry."
Ford knows her voluptuous good looks
are part of her allure, but she says
that unlike some of her contemporaries,
it's not an act. "I'm a sexy
person at heart, whether I'm 500 pounds
or what I weigh now," she says.
"This is the real me. This is
my life."
GIL KAUFMAN
Source: Rollingstone.com
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