But it is what’s disappointing about “ Half Written Story ,” the first part of Steinfeld’s two-part album. That market-researched artifice isn’t necessarily the only kind of “pretending” Williams is attempting to slough off with “ Petals ,” which she has made explicit is also about the dissolution of her decade-long relationship with New Found Glory’s Chad Gilbert. It’s possible to blame the lack of momentum on the fact that music is still Steinfeld’s side gig, but to have five years of singles without an album suggests that she might be at the mercy of the label’s plot to make her a Pop Star™ in the exact way Williams designed her entire career to avoid.
Instead, that’s all she’s really been in a position to do since she was signed by Republic at age 18 in 2015: one-offs that have gotten her to the upper tiers of Billboard’s Hot 100 without ever creating much of an identity as a musician at all. Their forgettable songs with Machine Gun Kelly and B.o.B, respectively, also present an easy point of comparison.īut for Steinfeld, those chart-baity songs weren’t just an easy personal brand-building exercise, as they might have been for Williams. Both were in Taylor Swift’s “Bad Blood” video, and both have collaborations with EDM monolith Zedd. Both had their first big break in their early teens, thanks to preternatural charisma and precocious talent (though Steinfeld’s was on screen, with her Oscar-nominated performance in 2010’s “ True Grit’ ). In that sense, fellow child star Hailee Steinfeld - who shares very little musical DNA with the literally-dyed-in-the-wool rocker - represents the road not taken for the now 31-year-old Williams. Yet just as persistently, Williams had rebuked the idea of going solo, dating all the way back to when she was signed by Atlantic, alone, at the tender age of 14. Williams was busy fighting the perception that she was the instigator of the band’s persistent drama because of the disproportionate attention she drew, much of which came in the form of drooling men pestering her both in magazines and at her shows. But as the reluctant face of an otherwise all-male band, she didn’t exactly make femininity and its accompanying rewards and challenges central to her artistic persona. Williams hadn’t completely avoided the topic in her impressive catalog with the group Paramore, one of this century’s most successful rock bands.
Get it right, and you might wind up with your very own “ Just A Girl.” B ut without insistent specificity and rebuke of anything that even smells like it might wind up immortalized as a wrongly-attributed quote on Instagram, you’re stuck in the hackneyed world of “ Fight Song ” and its tampon-commercial-music ilk. Like most of “Petals for Armor,” “Watch Me While I Bloom” successfully avoids cliché despite its focus on a topic that’s been a bugaboo for women in popular music since long before that quintet insisted on chicks before dicks: sexism. The Spice Girls are among the diverse array of influences Williams has cited while promoting the album, and nowhere is the pink tinge of their particular brand of bubblegum more evident than on this self-actualization anthem. “How lovely I feel not to have to pretend,” she adds, letting emotion slightly distort her powerful, flexible voice before the song’s ‘90s pop-ready bounce kicks in. “How lucky I feel to be in my body again,” Williams sings towards the conclusion of her frankly confessional new solo album, on a song whose title (and refrain) implies the realization of its central, floral metaphor: “Watch Me While I Bloom.”