(FORTUNE Magazine) – Macy Gray On How Life Is Epic

It happens right away. The whole process of persuasion takes, oh, about 30 seconds. You slip On How Life Is into the stereo. You hear the shuffle of "Why Didn't You Call Me," an oily grind of bass and organ and house-party hoots, all of it commandeered by a voice that sounds like Betty Boop slinking and weaving and raising spike-heeled hell at the Cotton Club--and, well, you're suckered. You're already sold. Macy Gray's heavily hyped debut album is such an instant pleasure machine, so generous with fat scoops of soul bliss like "I Try" and "Sex-O-Matic" that your critical faculties never even get a chance to sneak past the velvet rope. If you feel the need to gripe, go ahead: Yeah, Gray's squeaky, hacked-silk rasp owes a pretty obvious debt to Billie Holiday, just as her old-school benders can't help but echo Al Green and Tina Turner. But somehow this twentysomething West Coast diva gobbles up all that history and still comes across like an original, swanning through her own dusk-to-dawn R&B soiree with easy confidence and grace. On How Life Is is one of the best albums of the year; it never loses the flushed, steamy fever of that first spin.

--Jeff Gordinier