“Everyone is looking for love,” Joss Stone said midway through her sold-out show Wednesday at the House of Blues. “That’s why this [song] is the most important to me.”
The singer’s 10-piece backing band then roared to life as Stone cooed, “Music is my Mr. Right” from the disarmingly simple tune, “Music,” the centerpiece of her most recent album, “Introducing Joss Stone” (Virgin).
When Stone first appeared on the scene in 2003 as a scrawny 16-year-old with a husky voice, she was widely viewed as the discerning music fan’s alternative to pop music divas like Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera. She made a splash with a slinky cover of the White Stripes’ “I Fell In Love With a Boy” and that voice, which sounded almost unnatural coming from the Dover, England teen.
Now three albums into a career that has seen the singer branch into film (as a witch in “Eragon”) and advertising (as a model for a well-known clothing company), Stone is again attempting to assert herself as an alternative to the mainstream. Like fellow British imports Amy Winehouse and the Pipettes, she is enamored with ’60s American soul and R&B, an influence that fuels her latest album.
The album is also the singer’s attempt to distance herself from her earliest recordings. In interviews, she frequently mentions how this was her chance to finally carve out her own artistic destiny — a fact echoed in Stone’s 80-minute, 13-song set Wednesday that drew heavily from her latest release. To the singer’s credit, the performance, though far from perfect, proved to be a lively, funky affair that improved as the night wore on.
Despite her sexy image makeover (that’s Stone naked and slathered in psychedelic body paint on the album’s cover), the singer still came across like a teenager Wednesday, giggling between songs, fidgeting and nervously twirling her hair. Dressed in an orange and white dress and sporting a white headband, Stone looked as if she were auditioning for a role in the next installment of “Austin Powers.”
At times the music was equally retro. “Headturner” was awash in Stax soul, Stone pointedly referencing Aretha Franklin as she belted, “What you want, baby I got it!” While Stone doesn’t yet live up to her idols — Aretha, Dusty Springfield and Janis Joplin — there’s a certain audacity in the way she references these touchstones, whether she’s quoting the Queen of Soul, belting out like Janis (“Tell Me ‘Bout It”) or pulling back on a smoky, Springfield-esque ballad (“Bruised But Not Broken”).
It’s this vocal ability, still under development, that attracted heavyweight collaborators Common, Lauryn Hill and Raphael Saadiq (formerly of Tony Toni Tone) to work with the singer. But on this night the focus was purely on Stone, who pranced around starry-eyed, enjoying her newfound romance: “Nothing in the world got me like you do … I’m so in love with my music.”
