Word: bonoff
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...Linda Ronstadt sets a daunting standard and casts a long shadow. But watch while Karla Bonoff comes out, all on her own, into the light...
...first album, called simply Karla Bonoff, has so far sold over a quarter of a million copies, a surprisingly strong first-time showing-even considering the endorsement, and occasional vocal contributions, of Karla's friend Linda. Jackson Browne picked Bonoff to open his latest concert tours, and after seven weeks of stumping the South, Southwest and Midwest, she could finally start singing Someone to Lay Down Beside Me without having the audience suspect that she had copped one of Ronstadt's set pieces...
...enough to have audiences believing that you have knocked off the reigning empress of sunsweet, Southern California rock. But it's worse having to take some of her knocks. Bonoff's first album was greeted with widely enthusiastic reviews. A flintheart might, however, worry about an occasionally unreliable voice and a tendency, like Ronstadt's, toward a mood of languid victimization, as when the heartsore protagonist of Falling Star confides: "It rains a lot inside my heart...
More often, though, Bonoff's songs are at once genuinely poignant and strongwilled, with lines of startling grace: "The people I've seen/ They come in between/ The cities of tiring life." Put lyrics like that together with a typically luxuriant Bonoff melody and there are clear indications of a formidable talent. Watch her perform in her still uncertain way, singing sweet and simple, and sometimes flashing her fast, foxy smile, and there are strong intimations of stardom...
...Bonoff, 26, has been making preparations for that eventuality-no, say likelihood-during most of the past decade...