Volume Two

She is Zooey Deschanel, the indie-film dream-girl of ice-blue eyes and sardonic manner. Him is M. Ward, the singer-songwriter with the sepia-toned voice whose old-timey tunes sound like they ought to be broadcast through a phonograph cylinder. Together they created one the most delightfully unexpected musical treats of 2008, a relic of mellow ‘70s AM gold, blending rich girl group harmonies and with fragile Laurel Canyon folk-pop. What looked like yet another movie star vanity record sounded instead like a lost classic by Carly Simon or Carole King. Deschanel’s untrain ed voice was pretty and blithe, straightforward and unpretentious, yet little distant and mysterious. The songs on Volume One didn’t carry a lot of emotional charge—they sort of added up to a long, breezy sigh—but there was so much hazy prettiness in Ward’s Spector-like arrangements and so much warmth in Deschanel’s performance that it didn’t matter. The record was the soft summer wind that always carries traces of nostalgia and regret.

It's really not supposed to go this way. Actors from Eddie Murphy to Don Johnson to Lindsay Lohan record albums so that we can laugh at their hubris and casually dismiss their efforts. The story is so common it's created a Hollywood archetype: the actor-turned-singer-turned-punchline. But Zooey Deschanel is rewriting the script. With She & Him's Volume One, her first collaboration with M. Ward, she proved that not only could she act, write songs, and sing, but she could do them all very well, with a sparkle of personality glinting in those big eyes and bigger voice.