Willa Ford Toasts Girl Power
On her second album, tentatively titled Sexysexobsessive
and due early next year, Willa Ford mixes Christina Aguilera’s
dance-influenced raunch with Pink’s confessional pop. The set’s
first single, “A Toast to Men,” transforms a salty sorority chant
into a female-empowerment anthem.
“I was hanging out at a sorority party with some friends,” Ford
says, “and I heard these girls raise their glasses and do this
chant. It was a no-brainer. I had to do a song about it.” The taunt
goes: “Here’s to the men we love/Here’s to the men who love us/Fuck
the men, let’s drink to us.”
I wasn’t even sure my label would release a song that racy,”
says the twenty-two-year-old Ford. “It’s about a bunch of chicks
dancing and getting it on in a no-boys-allowed situation.”
Ford spent more than two years writing and recording the new
album, an eternity in teen pop. But she’s not afraid that her
downtime — during which she hung out in her New York hotel room
playing guitar and frequented Punk Rock Karaoke night at a Lower
East Side nightclub — has killed the momentum of her hit “I Wanna
Be Bad,” from 2001’s Willa Was Here.
“I was part of the revolution, as far as changing the way people
think of pop music,” she says. “I wanted it to be sexy and fierce
and be OK to say the word ‘fuck.’ I just needed some time to get
out of it and figure out what the fuck was going on.”
Ford wrote the new album by putting herself in the shoes of
Marilyn Monroe and imagining what it would feel like to turn so
many men on. On “Who I Am, Who Am I,” she plays with gender roles
and questions the divisions between gay and straight. On “Into My
Bed,” she relates a fictional account of a prostitute’s life that
was inspired by her own feelings of vulnerability as a teen trying
to break into the music business. “It’s deep, but very sexual,” she
says. “I felt violated when I was younger and dumber. I felt I was
used as Willa Ford, sexpot to everyone.”
One of the album’s more emotional tracks, “Cry,” is about a boy
Ford dated. “He was so closed down I couldn’t get him to open up,”
she says, “so I had to kiss that boy and make him cry.”
Ford knows her voluptuous good looks are part of her allure, but
she says that unlike some of her contemporaries, it’s not an act.
“I’m a sexy person at heart, whether I’m 500 pounds or what I weigh
now,” she says. “This is the real me. This is my life.”