Really Rosie Grows Up:Charlotte Martin's On Your Shore (Jazz-influenced Rock)

It’s easy to make Tori Amos comparisons with Charlotte Martin’s jazz-tinged piano pop rock, but on the song “Something Like a Hero,” I hear Really Rosie.

Really Rosie, the star and namesake of Maurice Sendak’s collaboration with Carole King on the 197_ musical film. Really Rosie was a tough street kid with the bravado of an 18-year-old but still only 8 years old, based in part on a street girl Sendak would watch from his apartment window in a rough Brooklyn neighborhood. Despite all of her gruff, ready-to-fight, bully attitude, Sendak saw that this street girl (and his character) desperately needed love.


Charlotte Martin bangs the opening chord walk progression on “Something Like a Hero,” and Really Rosie has grown up. In Martin’s piano, I hear what Carole King contributed to Really Rosie: pop rock which gets fleshed out by jazz changes. In Martin’s voice, I hear what Carole King gave to the character Really Rosie: individual lines that work like hooks, multiple emotional possibilities in one song, and a voice which soars, kids, sneaks, speaks, and invokes all of this.

Should Charlotte Martin’s “Something Like a Hero” be about Really Rosie all grown up, then I’m afraid Rosie’s search for love isn’t over. “Something Like a Hero” takes the bruised ego, hurting soul of Really Rosie, which as part of a children’s musical film actually is quite uplifting and hopeful, but the children’s book for “Something Like a Hero” isn’t G-rated. This grown-up Rosie is troubled by the culture’s demands to be what is deemed pretty, desirable, a “bombshell,” but it is leaving her drop-dead gorgeous. The closing scenes find her swimming out into the ocean, drowning, choking, asking the Lord for help but feeling that she’s too far gone. Carole King pounded the piano while Really Rosie pounded the pavement; Charlotte Martin pounds the piano while the waves pound against the grown up Really Rosie.

The themes of desperation, searching, and drowning run throughout Martin’s album, On Your Shore, especially the opening title track. The album is collection of urgent prayers to God, exposing the very raw nerves of someone needing to be loved.


Such themes of water/drowning, depression/self-realization, emptiness/self-worth, utter loneliness/love, reminds me of Wally Lamb’s novel, She’s Come Undone. The novel’s main character, Dolores Price, has reached an end of sorts, coming to Cape Cod, connecting with a beached, dying whale. On a cold November dawn, Dolores strips off her clothes, swimming out to the whale, swimming under her to see the whale’s eye.

The eye stared back at me without seeing. The iris was milky and blank, blurred by seawater. A cataract eye, an eye full of death. I reached out and touched the skin just below it, then touched the hard globe itself.

This was how I could die. This was where.

I fought against myself, my head butting downward to the bottom, arms pushing and flailing to stay under. I drank seawater in thick gulps and swallows, glimpsing the death eye in the middle of my battle.

Dolores fights off her urge to die with a surprisingly strong urge to live. She sits shivering on the beach in her wet clothes when a uniformed ranger pulls up in a jeep. He says, “Would you by any chance be Dolores Price? Some people been looking for you. They been worried.” Saved, found, given a blanket, confirmed to be alive, taken to safety, and yet, Dolores apologizes that people were worried about her. Her desperation speaks volumes about the hurt a person can feel.

With On Your Shore, Martin captures so much of that same wide chasm of hurt that we inflict on each, our minds inflict on ourselves, the world inflicts on us, the devil inflicts on all of us. What Wally Lamb describes in his story about Dolores Price, Martin describes in “Something Like a Hero” as she sings,

If I make make make make myself into a wave out there and
I’m never gonna ache like this again
And I’m never gonna ‘scape from here.

In She’s Come Undone, the ranger arrives to rescue Dolores. Martin’s song “On Your Shore” possibly presents God as the ranger as she sings,

I dig my heels into the dirt cause this one’s gonna hurt
Won’t let the waves wash me away is what I always pray
In my heart I know you couldn’t see in the dark or find your way through me
Now I’m alone my hands are numb how do I carry on

At the turn of the tide I feel this part of me die
Am I washed on your shore and barely alive?

The desperate figure in Martin’s song seems to letting her hopelessness die, turning instead to that faint hope of her prayers, washing up on the shore of God, as He rescues her from the desolate beach of “insecurity” and “damaged dignity.”

“Bang that piano, Charlotte! Bang it for all it’s worth. Bang those jazzed-up pop rock chords for your desperate characters in your songs. Bang that piano for Dolores. Bang that piano against the devil and for the hope of God!”

(By the way, Really Rosie is a great children’s album, and any resemblance to desperate, depressed, suicidal characters is much more about speculation and filling-in-the-blanks than actual facts in the songs. However, you’ll find as you sing along with your children to “One Was Johnny” and “Pierre” that there’s much a children’s album can teach your family about the hard realities of this life. Really Rosie is available from Sony Wonder.)

Thanks to Charlotte Martin and RCA Records for the review copy of On Your Shore.