Rock A Little: Rolling Stone Review

[The Tower]

Originally Posted by SapphireSister

And to The Tower: She may have been trying to "fit in" with the synthesizers and all but they were still HER songs. There is nothing wrong with curtailing your songs to what's going on at the moment and it wasn't all of them. I'm sure she had a lot of pressure from the label people as well to go with the popular sound at the time. Artists don't always have 100% creative control.

With the exception of "Talk to Me" and "Has Anyone...." there's nothing on here that's anything to crow about.

Most of the songs weren't HER songs- only three were purely written by Stevie:

"Rock A Little", "I Sing For the Things" and "No Spoken Word".

Her voice is abysmal from the drinking, the coke and the smoking. In comparison, at least her voice wasn't shot on Street Angel. Stevie didn't need creative control to realize that the album was not that good. Her songwriting, or rather her lack of songwriting from that period in time is telling enough- the material wasn't there, so the album wasn't there. Considering the two big singles from the album were 1) not written by her ("Talk to Me") and 2) fully formed with her slapping on some coked out screaming ("I Can't Wait), it's obvious she was very creatively wiped out at the time. No wonder she went into rehab after this album.

Some people really groove on that shredded, burnt-out, drugged-out Stevie, but I think Rock A Little was waaaay too much of that side of her.