Rachael MacFarlane is a voice actress who has lent her talents to a number of animated television projects since the late '90s, and in 2005, she was chosen to provide the voice of Hayley, the free-thinking, college-age daughter on the show American Dad. Since
Rachael's older brother
Seth MacFarlane was the creator of American Dad, as well as a producer and writer, her audition was presumably only slightly more rigorous than the one that landed
Seth the job of voicing Stewie Griffin on his other successful prime-time animated series, Family Guy. An interest in big-band jazz and pre-rock & roll pop music appears to run in the MacFarlane family, since
Seth released the
Sinatra-influenced
Music Is Better Than Words in 2011, and now
Rachael has cut her own album,
Hayley Sings, in which she interprets 14 popular standards in a variety of jazz and pop styles.
Rachael is a good enough singer (better than her brother, at least), but she brings a melodrama to several of these performances that's embarrassing and overbearing; she sells "Makin' Whoopee" so hard the lyrics get swallowed up in her overwrought phrasing, and when the cha-cha arrangement of "Do You Want to Dance" upshifts into salsa while MacFarlane interpolates the lyrics to
David Bowie's "Let's Dance," the effect is like falling into some aural rabbit hole. The arrangements by
Matt Catingub and
Tedd Firth lean to clichés, and when they do reach in an unexpected direction, it's often worse (the version of
Jim Croce's "Time in a Bottle" sounds like it was destined to accompany the "Local On the 8's" updates on the Weather Channel).
Rachael is easily at her best here when the performances are at their simplest -- her interpretations of "Since You Asked" and "Loneliness" are quite good, freed from an effort to sound "period" and simply approaching the lyrics at face value. However, the most curious aspects of the album are
Rachael's liner notes, in which she discusses how the songs were meant to reflect the taste of her fictional counterpart. If a crunchy semi-hippie like Hayley Smith were to make an album, it would be dominated either by
Ani DiFranco tunes, hipster indie rock in the manner of the
Arcade Fire, noodle-dance-friendly jam band material, or some combination thereof. Sorry,
Rachael, but there is no smell of patchouli on
Hayley Sings, and without that, your concept falls to the ground. ~ Mark Deming