It’s the Lipstick That Draws Attention, and the Name Helps Too (original) (raw)
Advertisement
- March 16, 2008
WALL TOWNSHIP
CHARLOTTE SOMETIMES has chipped red fingernails, lipstick on her teeth and an attitude that makes her excellent pop star material.
“Oh yeah I’m rude and crude and outspoken, and I’m comfortable saying what I need,” she said. “It fits.”
But the lanky 20-year-old, who will release her debut album, “Waves and the Both of Us,” on Geffen Records May 6 and play the Bamboozle Festival in East Rutherford the day before, might have made a name for herself anyway. She might even have done it without the stage name, which she came up with less than a year ago.
“Charlotte Sometimes is a girl in a book I read when I was little,” the singer explained at the Princess Diner here, where she used to hang out as a student at Wall High School. (“Charlotte Sometimes,” by Penelope Farmer, was published in 1969.)
“She gets trapped in another time, and she wants to reclaim her life,” said Ms. Sometimes, whose real name is Jessica Charlotte Poland.
The stage name “protects me,” she said. “I can go do a show as Charlotte Sometimes, and then go home and be someone else the girl who wants to read and be with her family.”
She has lived in Wall Township all her life, having been adopted by her parents, Hartson and Tracy Poland, as a baby; she was introduced at age 13, with their consent, to her birth mother, who lives nearby and with whom she is now friendly.
There have been some detours on the road that Ms. Sometimes, who leads a five-man band, has traveled to opening for artists like Pat Monahan. She studied dance at the Dancer’s Workshop in Belmar until she gave it up at age 16 and took up the guitar. “I danced constantly for 13 years jazz, tap, ballet,” she said.
“But for me to be a dancer I had to look at myself in leotards, and subject myself to ‘suck this in, push that out.’ ” Words first in the form of poetry, then song lyrics felt like a more suitable outlet for self-expression. And her songs Roy Orbison is a major influence on her pop-rock style earned her practically instant attention.
After signing with Crush Management in Manhattan in 2004, she became the subject of an ElleGirl magazine profile about a high school girl on a mission to land a record-label deal. While Ms. Sometimes was being trailed by a writer and photographer, though, she developed condylar resorption, a jaw disease. The magazine article, which captured her ordeal, was published, but her record-deal ambitions were dashed by the need for facial-reconstruction surgery.
And even now that Ms. Sometimes is on her way to a high-profile career an appearance on “The Tonight Show With Jay Leno” is in the works life isn’t always smooth.
“You see that Ford Focus with the mirror duct-taped to the side?” she asked, pointing into the Princess Diner’s parking lot while reapplying her lipstick. “That’s mine. I tend to get into a lot of wrecks.”
Advertisement