We woke up from some sort of obscure, terrifying dream the other night to realize that our abiding affection and love for Pete Yorn and Scarlett Johansson's improbable summer jam "Relator" had everything to do with Van Morrisson's "Glad Tidings." That the two songs are syncopated in almost exactly the same way is not a demerit. "Relator" is just a genius work of pop-pastiche--it's not like "Glad Tidings" is the only song being borrowed from here. Anyway, "Relator" has a video now, an appropriately sepia-toned and indistinct video, in which a brunette Johansson eerily resembles Sasha Grey (from certain angles, anyway), and Yorn and Johnsson sing to one another across a bed. For all that, it's not that sexy, which won't stop people from loathing this song out of jealousy and hateration, but whatever, that's everybody else's loss.

Scarlett Johansson, the musician, was last seen being loathed for Anywhere I Lay My Head, her Dave Sitek-assisted suite of Tom Waits covers, a project that was probably doomed (critically, anyway) by her incredible beauty and success way before it even got started. But that record was better than it had any right to be: Sitek got his Phil Spector moment, building an ridiculously lush production landscape out of rich source material; and Johansson, it turned out, could basically sing--in a limited range, and with limited affect, maybe, but with grace and a bit of an emotional charge as well.

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