Kate Hudson’s New Single Begs The Question: What Would Penny Lane Think Of “Talk About Love”?

Sometimes, a nepo baby will stick around long enough — and develop enough of their own following — that it becomes easy to forget their famous lineage. Though Kate Hudson’s physical and vocal resemblance to her mom Goldie Hawn has always been a part of her persona and career, she’s also been appearing in movies for over 20 years, and it would be perfectly understandable if someone who grew up on Almost Famous or How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days might not be aware that they star the daughter of Private Benjamin (or might not have seen/heard of Private Benjamin). Now, having achieved a certain level of independence, Hudson has graciously agreed to place herself back at zero by dabbling in the kind of singing career that makes people wonder anew whose famous parent(s) allowed this to happen: Behold, “Talk About Love,” her debut single.

I am not a professional pop music critic, so I may not be qualified to evaluate Kate Hudson’s first official jam. (More on her previous, unofficial jams in a moment.) I do listen to a lot of Carly Rae Jepsen, and can say with confidence that every single song on CRJ’s last five albums is superior to this one (yes, even “Now I Don’t Hate California After All”). Vocally, Hudson sounds a little like the grown-up Mandy Moore, though the middle-of-the-road disco-lite production and generic scratch-track lyrics wouldn’t pass muster on any of Moore’s recent records, either. (Also, not to split hairs, the title of the song is “Talk About Love” even though Hudson seems to be singing “I’m talkin’ bout love” repeatedly.)

This song is pretty terrible, but it’s not a terrible shock. Kate Hudson’s father is Bill Hudson, who sang in the band The Hudson Brothers with two of Kate’s uncles (though she was raised by Hawn and Kurt Russell and has supposedly had little contact with her bio-dad). Moreover, Kate has been identified with music since she first broke through playing “band-aid” Penny Lane in Almost Famous, Cameron Crowe’s semiautobiographical story of a young journalist following a ’70s rock band on tour. As Penny, the most charismatic and well-known of the band’s groupies, Hudson needed to simultaneously serve as a convincing peer of 15-year-old William Miller (Patrick Fugit); and a troubled romantic partner of Russell Hammond (Billy Crudup), the band’s “guitarist with mystique,” bridging youthful infatuation and a messy adult world she (and, for that matter, Russell) may not be ready for. (Penny gives her age as 16 in the movie, and though it’s not clear how truthful she’s being, we have no real reason to doubt her.) She also gives voice to music fandom by speaking with such conviction about what it means to love a band or a song “so much that it hurts.” It’s a miraculous performance that rightfully garnered her an Oscar nomination

Hudson didn’t ever try to replicate Penny Lane; she’s played a feckless woman given custody of children against her will more times than she’s played anyone in the immediate orbit of a rock band. But she has dipped back into music and music-adjacent roles over the years, often with disastrous results. If you want to enhance “Talk About Love,” check out the song written for Hudson to perform in the misbegotten all-star musical Nine. “Cinema Italiano” isn’t Hudson’s fault, of course, but it does place her in the spotlight for a singularly terrible mess of bad Rob Marshall musical directing, where it becomes mysteriously important, at any given moment, to cut to an angle slightly off to the side of the current angle, and even-worse songwriting. Her paean to Italian movies (especially the made-up ones directed by the movie’s protagonist, Guido Contini) is the kind of tribute that makes you feel sorry for the art (in this case imaginary) that it’s describing: “I feel my body chill / Gives me a special thrill / Each time I see that Guido neo-realism.” You may feel your body chill, too, but not in the right way.

Playing a journalist from Vogue, Hudson gives her all to lines like “Those scenes I love to see / from Guido’s POV” and gets nothing in return but a great-looking sparkly dress. In a display of enormous resilience, Hudson appeared in another full-fledged musical years later, as if attempting to make Nine look like sound judgment by comparison. She’s in Music, the Sia-directed, deeply ill-advised disability musical in which extremely Sia-like songs and sets are used to illustrate the inner world of an autistic teenager, played by a neurotypical Sia muse Maddie Ziegler. The less said about this movie, and the less seen of it, the better.

What Almost Famous gets at, and what her subsequent musical forays unwittingly step into, is that there’s something flighty and scene-y about Hudson’s musicality. She’s a vibes-first performer, which perfectly fits Penny Lane, a young woman who has chosen to fully dedicate herself to a band that is, by most outside indications, middling with occasional touches of greatness that almost make them seem more magical than if they were outright geniuses. When the those vibes are good, she’s singing along to “Tiny Dancer” and dancing to Cat Stevens, in a moment that Crowe supposedly caught unscripted. And when the vibes go bad, Crowe’s film covers the down-slope glide with rare delicacy; a movie like Nine or Music crash-lands straight into a swamp of bad vibes, leaving Hudson shimmying through the mucky wreckage.

Hudson’s single doesn’t go that far. It actually feels closer in spirit to Birdie Jay, the character she played in Glass Onion – one of her best (and probably most-seen) performances in years. Birdie has been a supermodel, a designer, and a mogul with a sweatshop-related PR problem (and, of course, a substantial social media following). She’s not exactly a dilettante, but she’s not exactly a sharp-minded professional, either, and “Talk About Love” feels like the type of song a model-turned-designer-turned-influencer might hire someone to cook up for her somewhere along that path.

I’m not suggesting that Hudson is a real-life Birdie Jay, any more than she’s a real-life Penny Lane. Part of the delight of her Glass Onion performance is how it turns over Penny’s greatest grace (her ability to appreciate someone else’s art) into a fatal flaw (her inability to truly appreciate anything that doesn’t have to do with her directly). Whether Hudson consciously took note of the contrast or not, she brought it to life beautifully. There’s none of that attention to specific behavior in “Talk About Love,” built on empty bromides about telling the truth and it being “our time, me and you” to put aside the world’s rancor and “have some fun” (finally, Kate Hudson gets the chance to have fun!). Maybe that’s the song’s ultimate utility: a way for Hudson to immerse herself in an inane song as a hobby, rather than another bad movie. Based on this evidence, the real Kate Hudson probably shouldn’t be making this music. But some day she could play that character and dance right along.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.