Album Review: Vanessa Williams’ ‘Survivor’

A baffling body of work full of incongruent brilliance.

Have you ever listened to an album that made no sense as a body of work, but track-by-track overflowed with incredible music? That’s Vanessa Williams’ new album, Survivor, a genre-jumping LP that attempts to merge and celebrate Williams’ genre-spanning talents. Unfortunately, it lacks the context and sequencing to effectively accomplish its goal.

Vanessa Williams has built a career so vast that no single thing fully and accurately defines her. Many know her as the first Black Miss America, as well as the first Miss America to resign the title (and, 32 years later, the first to receive a long-overdue apology). Some know her for hits including “Save The Best For Last” and the Oscar-winning “Colors Of The Wind.” Others know her as the devious Wilhelmina Slater from TV’s Ugly Betty, or Teri from the film Soul Food. Her work spans stages and screens, big and small, and she occupies all of those spaces masterfully. She’s a true multi-hyphenate entertainer: model, singer, actor (she also has author, clothing designer, and producer among her accomplishments). Her career is one that dreams are made of. 

I don’t think “adore” cuts it for me. I’ve been stuck on Williams since A Diva’s Christmas Carol premiered on VH1 in 2000. Over the years, I’ve unapologetically let my fan flag fly. I snuck backstage to meet her after seeing her in concert for the first time. I attended the opening night of POTUS because I was so excited she was back on stage. Into The Woods, which earned her a Tony nomination, was the first Broadway production I ever attended. And while I don’t keep up with her every nuance and movement, I was thrilled wen she announced that she was releasing her first album in 15 years. For years I’ve said that “Vanessa Williams can do no wrong in my book,” but that ends today with Survivor, a baffling body of work that I barely survived listening to. 

Musically, Williams is as much a multi-hyphenate as she across all realms of the entertainment industry. She effortlessly spans genres: pop, dance, R&B, jazz, and Broadway. Unfortunately, she decided to cram all those genres together on one album. Dissected bit-by-bit, Survivor is full of fantastic moments, but they have no business sitting side-by-side without better transitions.

Henry Hey, who lent his skills as a musician and producer to a few of the album’s songs, said in a Facebook post that one of Survivor’s key objectives was to highlight significant moments of Vanessa’s career on stage with songs that hold great personal significance. It would be tremendously helpful to have that context within the album. A wiser executive producer and A&R might have broken the album into distinct acts, perhaps even with spoken or musical interludes to smooth the incredibly jarring mix of genres, tempos, and time periods. Though it’s beautiful to see artists branch out and reclaim their independence and autonomy, this project serves as a reminder that labels and their drive for commercial viability have a purpose; preventing stumbles like this. 

When Williams delivered her first two tastes of Survivor, they gave the impression that she was headed in a dance-pop direction. “Legs (Keep Dancing)” perfectly strutted her back into music. As the title alludes, the song is an upbeat ode to dancing on aging–but-still-effective legs. You could say she was putting her best foot forward. 

Except she had a better one behind it. Second single “BOP” featuring her daughter Jillian Hervey (better known as half of the group Lion Babe) and Trixie Mattel (multi-hyphenate drag queen who co-judged competition series ‘Queens of the Universe’ with Williams), is arguably one of Williams’ best dance tracks to date. It’s an irresistible record with house and funk influences, and a nod to ballroom culture. Both singles also arrived with fantastic dance mixes which are worth a listen.

Third single and album opener “iLike Moonlight” was the proper warning that she wouldn't be holding in one realm. The song is a Cuban-flavored number with some solid flair, but it’s where the congruence falls apart. 

As Survivor continues, all hell breaks loose, which is probably not what she had in mind when she sang “I’m about to give ‘em hell again,” in “Legs.” The title track is something that sonically belongs in 2016 on an Ariana Grande album (it’s very “Be Alright”). It’s not bad, it’s just painfully out of place. Even more so afterwards, when Williams delivers Natalie Cole’s breezy, Latin “La Costa,” it’s a beautiful cover that highlights the striking similarity between their vocal tones, but feels just as strange sequentially as its predecessor. 

She leans further into Latin music with the Brazilian-flavored “Vuelve,” and then abruptly pivots into 1930s jazz on “Junk Man” and Cab Calloway’s “Zaz Zuh Zaz” with the great Wynton Marsalis on trumpet before staking her claim to Frank Sinatra’s “Come Dance With Me” from 1959. There isn’t a bad arrangement or recording among them, and she sounds perfectly at home singing all of these songs.

Just as suddenly, she crosses over to Broadway and sings “On The Other Side Of The Tracks” from Little Me. Then, an aggressive dance beat surges and she’s singing “Here’s To You” to “names you may never know” to a melody that momentarily bears resemblance to the Maude theme song. Though the intention may be to acknowledge and pay tribute to friends and heroes both here and gone, it comes across as a “thank yous” section of the liner notes to a dance beat rather than Janet Jackson’s “Together Again.” “Here’s To You” is the only song in this collection that doesn’t warrant a replay. 

The album’s other contemporary record “I See You” feels just as ill-placed as the title track, but when she rushes back to Broadway with Hallelujah, Baby!’s “Being Good Isn’t Good Enough,” she gives the ballad a very personal and striking reading. As she sings “when I fly, I must fly extra high,” it’s hard not to recall the challenges that she’s experienced in her career, namely the Miss America debacle. Those sentiments evaporate like water on a hot summer day as the album closes with a “Come Dance With Me” remix that sounds straight out of the mid-2000s series Verve Remixed. 

I’ve rarely said this about an album but I don’t think I can handle another full-length listen to Survivor as it stands. The music contained within this album is largely fantastic; she delivers in the genres of pop, dance, jazz, Latin, and Broadway. There’s one, maybe two misses across the entire album. But it doesn’t feel like an album. Survivor feels like a haphazard hodgepodge that tries to paint with all the colors of the wind to make a rainbow, but instead it mixes too many colors in the wrong order and ends up creating muddy water.

I hope Williams doesn’t wait another 15 years to follow Survivor. I just pray that if she compiles another album that tries to display her full musical range, she finds collaborators who can help covey her vision in a manner that is both cohesive and comprehensible to the rest of us. But I also have to make peace with the possibility that none of that may happen. As she sings on “Legs,” “my time is managed doing much better things, than tryna prove myself to you.”

Survivor is currently available digitally, with a physical version to be released on October 25.

Listen to a resequenced Survivor: