In 2004, Ashlee Simpson was primarily known as a little sister. By the time she began working on her debut album, her older sister Jessica Simpson had skyrocketed from a young, Southern, blond pop princess to a bona fide A-lister, thanks to the hit reality show The Newlyweds, which chronicled Jessica’s marriage to 98 Degrees heartthrob Nick Lachey.
As a teen, Ashlee was famous by proxy. She toured with her sister and started to act on TV shows like Malcolm in the Middle and 7th Heaven. Her singing ambitions stayed on the backburner until she hit her twenties — that’s when she got a major break and recorded the spunky Freaky Friday soundtrack cut “Just Let Me Cry,” a sharp, pop-punk contrast to the saccharine bubblegum sound all over her sister’s discography.
It was because of this opportunity that Ashlee got her first record deal. She spent 2003 recording what would become Autobiography, an album that turns 20 this week. (She was simultaneously making her own reality show series The Ashlee Simpson Show, which chronicled the album process and also became a hit). With new jet-black hair and thick black eyeliner, Ashlee set herself apart not only from her sister but from many of the other pop girls that the the industry probably intended for her to compete with at the time. Instead, she fit herself into a post-Avril Lavigne musical landscape with ease, writing confessional guitar-driven cuts.
What worked for Ashlee was leaning into a messier, less pristinely built image than her sister’s had during the early peak of her pop career. Her voice had a distinctly edgy rasp that she yelped out those scream-along lyrics with. On the chorus of title track “Autobiography,” she celebrates her stained t-shirt and the flirty side of recovering from a heartbreak. Meanwhile, power ballad “Shadow” addresses the anxiety of sharing the same ambitions as an already-famous sibling.
It’s the album’s lead single, however, that most perfectly executes Ashlee’s mix of early twenties chaos with her specific brand of karaoke-ready, catchy, rock-tinged cuts. “Pieces of Me” is a love song written about her then-boyfriend Ryan Cabrera, where Ashlee fesses up to her flaws to a person who already loves all of them. It’s adult-contemporary, Vh1 Top 20 Countdown-core with a twist; the song is sensitive and earnest with that hint of rebellion that Ashlee carried so well.
Over the past two decades, Autobiography has held up as well as it did upon its release. It was 2004’s biggest debut album by a female artist and went triple platinum. The singles were international hits, with “Pieces of Me” hitting Number Five on the Billboard Hot 100.
Of course, all of the work Ashlee had done to show she as not only her own artist but a great one at that faced a major setback when she appeared on Saturday Night Live in October of that year, a few months after her album had already taken off. She had lost her voice the day of her appearance and decided to use a pre-recorded track to lip-sync to. When the wrong vocal track accompanied the band’s live performance, Ashlee proceeded to do a “hoedown” dance as the show cut to commercial.
The backlash wave put a wrench in people’s idea of her authenticity, but that didn’t stop Ashlee from releasing a streak of excellent songs over her next several albums. Singles like “Boyfriend” and “Outta My Head” proved she could be as much a pop princess as her sister and peers — but she never had to lose her edge. And for the young listeners who loved Autobiography and Ashlee in spite of the public’s disapproval, the album has continued to remain one of the most prescient and raw releases from that era. And at 20 years old, the same age Ashlee was when she made it, it still sounds as fresh, fun and relatable as it did in 2004.
Jack White Responds After Uproar Over Taylor Swift Songwriting Comment
This is why we can’t have nice things.
Jack White posted a statement on Instagram Monday evening after numerous publications took his comments in an interview with The Guardian out of context. When discussing poetry and songwriting, White mentioned fellow musician Taylor Swift‘s style of songwriting, and explored his own approach to storytelling when creating music. Unfortunately, online outlets framed his words as a critique of the Tortured Poets star, especially when it came to headlines that quickly circulated on the internet.
“Putting this up for a day and then taking down to just put this to bed,” wrote White in the since-deleted post. “I didn’t say that I think Taylor Swift’s music was ‘boring’ or whatever click bait the net is trying to scrape together. What I was trying to say in an interview I did about poetry and lyric writing, was that I don’t find it interesting at all for ME to write about MYSELF in my own lyric writing and poetry because I think that it could be repetitive for ME to always write about and It could be uninteresting for people who listen to my music to delve into, and that imaginary characters are more attractive to me as a writer.”
White went on to acknowledge the “tremendous success” of Swift and other songwriters who have their own process, while stating that just “because I say I have a way of doing things doesn’t mean that I think that EVERYONE should do it the same way.” He added, “They should do what works for them, And they do, and it is obviously appealing to many people, and I’m glad to hear that.”
When asked by The Guardian in the article published Sunday, if any of any of his songs were entirely autobiographical, White replied, “Not too much. Now it’s become very popular in the Taylor Swift way of pop singers writing about all of their publicly aired break-ups, which I don’t find interesting at all. I think it’s a little bit boring for me to write about myself.”
White further explained, “Even if I’ve had a really interesting day, I feel like I’ve already lived that, I don’t need to go through it every time I sing this song. If it’s something really painful, I’m not going to put this important, painful thing that I went through out there for some idiot on the internet to stomp all over. So I put a percentage of that into what I do and then morph it into somebody else’s character. I can’t really learn about myself until I put it into somebody else’s shoes.”
Editor’s picks
The 250 Greatest Albums of the 21st Century So Far
The 100 Best TV Episodes of All Time
The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time
100 Best Movies of the 21st Century
In his Monday statement, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee said that at times he has been “made less and less interested in doing interviews” amid the “age of this massive demand for click bait and content.” Any “scrape of anything interesting” can be used as drama and “spit out as bait,” he continued, leading White to “not want to answer questions with any sort of romance or passion or reflection as I’m too busy having to worry about accidentally triggering nonsense like this from so called ‘journalists’ and ‘editors.'”
Trending Stories
Jack White Responds After Uproar Over Taylor Swift Songwriting Comment
Watch Hilary Duff's Intimate Performance of 'Roommates' on 'Fallon'
Rihanna Shooting Suspect Held for Attempted Murder on $10.2 Million Bail
Amy Klobuchar Slams Live Nation Settlement: 'Every Sign Points to a Backroom Deal'
He ended his response to the wave of backlash following his interview by saying, “This has always been a problem as it encourages artists to give ‘safe’ answers to any question and stifles artistic vision and imagination and pushes all of us to not share anything interesting, which was one of the points I made about keeping private things private in that same interview. But yeah, content.”
ADVERTISEMENTWhite recently released Jack White: Collected Lyrics & Selected Writing Volume 1, a collection of lyrics from the artist’s solo recordings including No Name, The Raconteurs, and more, plus selected poems and writings by White, and essays by poet Adrian Matejka.