Scarlett Johansson Digs Up Jeff Buckley’s Corpse, Kicks It… Sexily

Christopher R. Weingarten | January 27, 2009 1:30 am

Sexy siren and star of Rob Reiner’s 1994 classic North Scarlett Johansson has covered a Jeff Buckley song. And it sucks. And you can hear it inside! And if that’s not what gets people to click inside blog threads then we’ve been going at this Internet thing all wrong! What if we told you we had nude photos of her too?

…Well, we don’t. What’s up Google perverts!

Anyway, she’s butchering ol’ Buckley’s “Last Goodbye” for He’s Just Not That Into You, a movie with a title that is so pukeworthy that I’m not even going to Wikipedia to find out what it’s about. Now, it would be too easy to call her tone-deaf—especially since her tunelessness actually worked on her album of Tom Waits covers. Seriously, everyone who says this girl can’t sing needs to take a long hard look at their Nico albums. Sing away, ScarJo! Lost in a swirl of Sitek syrup (ew?), she was a dreamgaze chanteuse and I loved, loved, loved her for it. Plus, who can fuck up a Tom Waits song?

But with no Sitek, no Waits songs, and maybe about 1/16 of Buckley’s vocal range, ScarJo just sounds like she’s at an open mic night. You know that part in “Last Goodbye” where Jeff Buckley’s voice gets higher and higher and he reaches those magical peaks that slouchy messenger bag kids sometimes trick themselves into thinking is a special moment for mixtapes, but is secretly just major label proto-Josh Groban with a bad haircut? Yeah, she just skips that part. When they pass around the hat, I’m totally not putting in any money!

Scarlett Johansson Covers Jeff Buckley [Stereogum]