Grand

An album this stylistically promiscuous needs a fairly imposing central personality to hold it all together, and McKeown just about manages on this score, as well. Her voice, while somewhat cutesy and cloying, never becomes overbearingly so--it's at its best on a lovely version of the Judy Garland standard "Lucky Day"--and she's an engaging narrator of her tales. There aren't enough songwriters to whom it would occur to write a song in the form of a letter from Igor Stravinsky, holed up in Hollywood in the 1940s while he waited in vain for Dylan Thomas to recover from tuberculosis so the pair could write an opera together. --Andrew Mueller