Consumer Guide Album

Aretha Franklin: So Damn Happy [Arista, 2003]
No, not that "Ain't No Way," or that "Everybody's Somebody's Fool" either. New ones, shorter on tune hence longer on voice--a musical correlative of the way she blurs the erotic-domestic details of the relationships the songs are about. Instead, her singing embodies relatedness itself: the experience of human proximity, of emotion expressed subject-to-object. B+