The 333 Best Pop Songs of the 2000s: #284

#284: "I Idolize You" (2008) - Lizz Wright

Not too long ago, the missus and I watched a show on the best steak served in America (a Mississippi restaurnant--Doe's Place up in Greenville--ranked third). The one common cooking technique all the top restaurants shared was the rate in which they cooked their steaks: slow, to give the steak's natural juices time to simmer down into the meat and enrich the cut.

Gospel/Jazz/Blues vocalist Lizz Wright treats her rendition of the Ike & Tina Turner nugget the same way. Instead of ratcheting up the heat to a quick broil (as Tina did--but to be fair, Wright doesn't sing uptempo soul/rock anywhere near as well as Tina--most don't), she lets the song slow burn, allowing producer Craig Street (Norah Jones, Holmes Brothers, and--most notably because of the similarity in sound--Cassandra Wilson) to train his cooks Glenn Patscha (piano/Hammond B3 organ), Joey Burns (bass), John Covertino (drums, and both of those Chefs work at Calexico on the weekdays), and his Iron Chef (avant-garde guitarist Oren Bloedow) to use their cutlery with the utmost precision while Wright lets her deep, sultry, jazz-tinged voice ooze and drip deeply into the record, coaxing the song's inherent sensuality to the fore and to the fork. Give me a knife and let me slice; I want a bite.