She's the daughter of Eagles guitarist Joe Walsh, and she's angling for a slice of pop stardom somewhere between Avril Lavigne and the Bratz. Her album "Lost in the Lights," due Oct . 23 on Island Records, has a candy-coated rock sound with sprinkles of dance music and hip-hop.
The 24-year-old Walsh has a whole team of music-industry veterans behind her -- not just her famous father but producers and songwriters like JR Rotem (Rihanna's "S.O.S."), Lester Mendez (Shakira, Beyoncé) and Matthew Wilder (if you don't know his 1983 hit "Break My Stride," you may know him as a producer for No Doubt). Walsh is said to have co-written "most of" her album tracks, according to Island.
The first single is "So Uncool," a simple dance track painted in bright, primary colors, but more interesting is the potential second single, "Crash." It's a classic example of the music-industry axiom that the surest way to create a hit is to remake one.
If the opening wedding bells of "Crash" sounds familiar, that's because they're lifted from "(There's) Always Something There To Remind Me," a pop hit four decades old that never lies dormant for too long before some newbie rediscovers it. Depending on your age, you'll think it's by the British group Tin Tin Out (in 1998), new-wavers Naked Eyes (1983), Dionne Warwick (1968), the UK siren Sandie Shaw (1964) or soul-singer Lou Johnson (also in 1964), for whom Burt Bacharach and Hal David first wrote it.
To her credit, Walsh uses those wedding bells as a springboard to a whole new song, eschewing the original sense of heartbreak for teen sassiness: "Let's crash the main attraction / Crash the night, whatever you wanna do."
Listen to "Crash" here.