This should be an interesting listen. Here’s NPR with the report:
Some works of art take years of labor, frustration and even heartache. But for songwriter Pete Yorn, his latest album came to him instantly, in something of a dream.
Yorn envisioned a series of male-female duets inspired by the late-1960s recordings of Serge Gainsbourg and Brigitte Bardot. For Yorn, finding today’s Bardot was easy; he called actress Scarlett Johansson to see if she would collaborate — and she said yes. The result is their new record, Break Up.
Yorn says the songs came to him easily and he wrote them quickly, in a “mad flurry” over a short period of time.
Johansson says that for her, the project was more about Yorn trying to capture a certain type of sound, rather than comparing her directly to Bardot.
“When I asked him what he envisioned, he mentioned Serge and Brigitte, Lee Hazlewood and Nancy Sinatra,” Johansson says. “So for me, I kind of saw it more as ‘he said, she said’ duets, as opposed to something that was just two people singing together. It’s the kind of interplay between a male perspective and a female perspective, so they were a great example of that.”
– from NPR