Jennifer Warnes
Shot Through the Heart

Pop: light music, unpretentious but not empty; intelligent, sometimes even cultured but not overly intellectual, popular but not vulgar. This, many years ago, was Pop, and one of its best female incarnations was Jennifer Warnes.

Her destiny was strange: gifted with a voice of incredible range, crystal timbre and expressiveness, a perfect combination of black power and white softness, friend and faithful partner of Leonard Cohen both in the studio and on stage for over twenty years, also marked by a wonderful tribute album like "Famous Blue Raincoat" and an excellent musician and songwriter herself, unfortunately she is most remembered for "Time Of My Life", and sometimes for a pleasant hit in America, "Right Time Of The Night" from 1977.

With that pleasant and "cunning" ditty, Jenny's career seemed finally to have reached a decisive turning point, but she was no longer very young, she had already passed thirty, and her personality and stage presence were certainly not typical of a song vamp. So, right at the critical moment of her career, at the crossroads between oblivion and ultimate recognition, the music market plays a dirty trick on Jennifer Warnes: her album "Shot Through The Heart" goes largely unnoticed, much like what had happened a few years earlier to the much more established Joan Baez with her "Gulf Winds", and in both cases, we're talking about products of great depth and personality, unjustly consigned to oblivion.

1979 sees the singer engaged on two fronts: "Recent Songs" by Leonard Cohen, to which she will provide a great contribution, and her own album, "Shot Through The Heart", which as I've already mentioned will not be the album of consecration, but rather the one of maturation. Until then, Jennifer Warnes had been a mere interpreter; here, for the first time, she demonstrates she can tackle the art of songwriting with great results, finding the perfect balance for a Pop album with all the aforementioned characteristics: "Shot Through The Heart" is varied, sparkling and full of colors, the album of a great entertainer, of an excellent vocalist.

The perfect melody of "Don’t Make Me Over" by Burt Bacharach is the perfect opportunity to unleash all her soulful and explosive energy, managing to overshadow the original performer Dionne Warwick, with a brilliance and vivacity that permeate the entire album, however never to the detriment of the songs: for example, "Sign On The Window", one of the best episodes of "New Morning", an underrated album by Bob Dylan, remains largely faithful to the original, Jenny proves capable of not distorting the particularity of Dylan's sound with her overwhelming vocals, paying homage with an impeccable performance, not wild but certainly subtle and mercurial enough, with great appeal and sure to please its original creator, just like the third and last cover of the album, "Hard Times Come Again No More" by the legendary Stephen Foster, the first great American popular songwriter, sublimated in a wonderful a cappella interpretation, intense, expansive, and spiritual, where male choirs follow and accompany the main voice in a fascinating counterpoint, practically the same solution that will be repeated in 1987 for "A Singer Must Die" by L. Cohen.

Among the original tracks of "Shot Through The Heart", the ones not signed by Jennifer Warnes are also the simplest and most limited episodes, good examples of late-seventies pop like the danceable "Tell Me Just One More Time", the sunny and romantic "When The Feeling Comes Around", and also "I Know A Heartache When I See One", a decent up-tempo country-pop with a suggestive and Nashville sound, mistakenly chosen as the launch single and indeed somewhat impersonal and, if not for her voice, forgettable, although it's still a song of incomparable value for today's hit-parades.

Far more significant are two intense orchestral piano-ballads like "You Remember Me" and the velvety and compelling "I'm Restless", written by J. Warnes herself, who also puts her signature on two of the album’s best episodes: "Shot Through The Heart" is a triumphant pop march surrounded by gospel choirs that seems straight out of a musical, a small explosion of vibrant colors that almost touches camp without grossly falling into it, and finally the short "Frankie In The Rain", accompanied by the trembling sound of an electric piano, is a moving, candid ballad of intimate inspiration, ennobled by an angelic voice at the height of its expressiveness.

"Shot Through The Heart" is certainly not a masterpiece in the strict sense; today it shows all its years and it’s not even Jennifer Warnes' best album, who will manage to do better with "The Hunter" and especially the stunning "The Well", but it is a beautiful snapshot, the photograph of Pop in one of its last moments of glory before the eighties coup by Madonna & co, which will transform lightness into crude emptiness of content, entertainment and unpretentiousness into vulgar and arrogant exhibitionism, and since then Jenny will undergo a transformation herself, from a potential pop star to an alternative artist, in the truest sense of the word: few records, never under the blinding spotlight, but with each of her releases always emotions, always great music, and "Shot Through The Heart", in its own small way, is the moment when the star of Jennifer Warnes finally lights up.