When rockers switch from acoustic guitar to blasting you with a tight, powerful chorus from one bar to the next, they can shake buildings without disturbing your daydreams until they seem to lose their own.
Both women in this column have talent nurtured by the media and adored by fans. Both stir admiration and unease with what they sing of their lives, which gets pretty personal.
Anouk Teuwe, a wild child turned chart-topping darling of the Netherlands, is known to her fans as "The Voice". It's a big sound, she's a ghetto-blaster when she lets rip.
Anouk's no fabricated monster. She's described on some Dutch sites as the nation's Alanis Morrissette and sings in English with a strong band behind her, but the heart of 'Hotel New York' (from MusicSafe, Nl, or the iTMS), was an agonised cry in 2004 from a rebel hard up against a wall.
 The album was recently re-released in a double disc package including acoustic versions of her hits, while another new album, 'Update,' is selling well in northern Europe. That's live Anouk, who took to the stage the way she looks in the photo for much of a swift rise to platinum award-collecting status. In an interview that's mostly far less revealing, she complained that being pregnant with her third child was a drag since it got her out of shape.
Though Anouk is renowned for being outspoken, it's rare she is with music journalists. Maybe her hatred of being labelled puts her off. She tells us plenty about who she is in songs where she left her blues roots behind for a while, turning to the ska sound of Jamaica's ghettos and folk.
On hearing people clearly being straight about the trouble they've known, if it's on familiar ground where I've learned something myself with women, I occasionally meditate and then send a brief mail. There's no wish to pry beyond what they sing, which is none of my business, but encouraging musicians and giving my friends "songlines" of the kind of music some say they feel they need certainly are.
Ballads on 'Hotel New York' are about being lost. The word's the title and content of one track, and Anouk's feeling of losing the way recurs in a hit called 'Jerusalem' that has nothing in common with Blake's poem the English have turned into an unofficial anthem, apart from being a visionary goal.
I wrote to a friend of hers, Mir, also a loyal fan who relayed Anouk's wishes to the world for a "bloody fucking great 2006" and is proud that 'Hotel New York' was "the best sold album of 2005 in Holland!" at an enthusiastic site, Noukster. The CD got into my library on the strength of songs on 'Together Alone', a bestseller from 1998 from a woman who first attracted attention with the searing self-diagnosis of Urban Solitude', when she was turning 24.
Anouk may have made her country's most popular album, but at what cost?
"Let's say I'm feeling better
Let's say I'm feeling fine
Let's say I gave you all I had
And now I'm out of time
And my best wasn't good enough
(...) But I'll do it all again" ('My Best Wasn't Good Enough').
When she writes lyrics like those she means them, but for a performer who flirts with burnout, Anouk persists in staying close to the edge and has described the emptiness she feels on coming off the stage. Her songs, she said, are born in that sense of solitude.
I told Mia what I heard in these things and wondered what she made of it.
"I think Anouk is just fine (...) and she's very happy with her three children and husband. She was very bad, had a burnout a few years ago. She still has her depressed moods, but who hasn't?
"I think it's a good thing she's empty coming from stage, because she lets everything go in her performance (which you can see in her performance, [it] makes it better)."
Mia got thanked for that answer and I murmured to myself, "The show must go on!" Anyhow, blogrolled critic Arjan writes:
"'After the release of her album 'Together Alone' in the States in 1998, Anouk realized that making it big in the U.S. meant compromising. Something she refused to do (much to Sony's dismay). Instead, the rock chick built a very successful recording career in The Netherlands that includes many hit singles and albums. Most recently, she won an MTV Award 2005 in the category of Best Act from the Netherlands/Belgium."
The burnout Mia confirmed was presumably what the Dutch Rock and Pop Institute (Holland Rocks) describes as a "throat infection" that laid Anouk out for a whole summer, like others constantly in the public gaze with the same right to privacy as the rest of us and PR people to protect it.
"There are fans who are telling me that I have 'power' and that I am an animal and a horny bitch. Of course, my 'look' is playing a big part too. But I have more to offer. I don't go through too much trouble to dress myself sexy."
She chooses casual. You'll rarely see a belt or any other accessories. That's undated, but the 'Anouk Land' bio it comes from is an old one of a girl who got the blues from her mother's band, fled at 14, wound up in a home for "problem kids", tried college but hated the theory, went into a marriage scarcely out of her teens and ended it with a shotgun divorce and a wild reputation she nurtured.
Across the Atlantic there's a singer who courts the media so much with her own PR it dampened interest until someone suggested I lend the self-titled 'Anastacia' an ear. By then she'd had a tough year in 2003 braving breast cancer and pulled through after successful treatment, set up a foundation to help other women facing this frightening disease. 'Heavy on My Heart', a song she says she never expected to write since it's so personal, straightforwardly concerns how she handled it.
The unease that tempered my admiration for that and one or two other songs grew watching the DVD that came with it! Someone should have reminded her a place she visited in South Africa is called Robben Island. When someone of Anastacia's fame meets a man like Nelson Mandela and gives us video footage of how wonderful it was, she could at least get the name of one of the world's best-known former prisons right.
 Maybe Anastacia (home) gushes sincerity, but she's no rebel. I'm reluctant to use the word "bonus" of the DVD, unless you're into a flurry of "amazing" album producers, loads of "love you" kisses for her helpmates, girlie giggles with a co-writer over cat allergies that mean changing recording studios, a multi-suitcase wardrobe to fit an army of one, and the breath-taking business of buying toilet paper for a huge California house apparently fitted with more bathrooms than bedrooms.
Unless you write frequently about living with it at Cancergiggles (blogrolled long ago), there's nothing funny about cancer. Cass Brown spares everyone an Anastacia-sized ego and doesn't make dopey remarks aboard a private jet she uses inadvertently to promote the image of the "Today's Wednesday, so it must be Rome" tourist.
To be fair, Anastacia asserts that what she did and saw during the South African trip put her problems in perspective, but the scale of everything she makes public can be a little overblown. She comes from a huge country, the sound of some of it suits me fine, even a little of Anastacia's music, but has nobody called her "The Voice" too?
The profession the log's mostly about is a perilous one.
All women musicians worth their salt at it know that. But do you wonder I sometimes ask myself what it does to the professionals and just what it is, apart from the obvious, they get out of it?
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*The photos came without credits. This is a pity since it's possible whoever should get some for the second was expressing a very dry sense of humour with the prop.
The rewrite combines elements of two entries; the poet who initially sat uneasily with Anastacia will find herself in easier company. Few women remain to reinstate, but the biggest challenge will now be the last such column.
7:19:13 PM link 
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