The author, Debra Gwartney, has experienced a parent's nightmare of difficult teen years with her daughters.

Our estrangement, the not speaking, had come after years of trouble with Amanda and her sister Stephanie...To even mention their father in our household meant a dose of scorn from me, and when the two oldest girls and I began arguing about friends they hung around with, about skipping school, about staying away from the house for days on end...One night when they were 16 and 14, the girls loaded their army packs and headed for the front door, where I stood with feet planted and arms crossed. We collided there, pulling and pushing and grabbing while their two younger sisters cried, "Stop it! Stop!" from the other side of the room.

The two girls ride the rails, go missing, fall into drugs and trouble, and obviously their mother knows pure hell. This essay recounts a tentative detente, a Mother's Day bonding over a Tom Waits concert. Tom Waits, the author explains, had been the soundtrack of her divorce, and for her daughters, of their period of their wild emancipation

"the only adult who could possibly understand why they had hit the road. At least that's how they thought of it. Tom Waits knew what it was like to be torn apart by people who claim to love you; Tom Waits knew why they chose to abandon their home, their sisters, their town, their mother.

When she arrives at the concert, the author realizes her daughter's bought her a ticket some six rows away. But she's glad just to be there, to be speaking, to feel her daughter will allow her in her life. It's unspeakably sad. We've all seen or experienced these relationships: the shift in power whereby a parent becomes pathetically grateful for any contact or any sense of normalcy. To the child, it can seem inexplicable;forget authority or respect - when things get to this point, a parent is eager for crumbs of friendship, happy to walk on eggshells for the privilege of being in a child's life, eager to bond over the music of an artist who may express many things, but for whom normal parental responsibility seems fairly alien. The burden of the love is stifling and reassuring, and something about this essay expresses it perfectly.Even those of us past those tumultuous years have heard that note in our mothers' voices sometimes - eager for our time, grateful to hear our voices - and had moments of sadness at the power shift that's taken place.

I remember riding in the car with my own mom as a pre-teen and her saying how she used to know Tom Waits a little bit in the 70s and how he'd prey on young girls. I wonder if it was true; back then I didn't question it, of course. But either way it made him seem like an especially meaningful choice for a mother-daughter reunion. What's so sad about the essay is that one doesn't know if the author's relationship with her daughters will be repaired, because she clearly has so little control over the situation; she pours her 18-year-old a glass of wine, does her hair, bites her tongue. All the reader can do is hope with her that things will be okay, marvel at the power of parental love, and maybe make a mental note to call home a little more often, if only to help repay the karmic debt that teenage years seem all about amassing.

The Long Way Home [NY Times]

• Brad Pitt's mom was supposed to move into the Long Island estate where the posse is staying while Angelina Jolie films Salt, but Angelina has reportedly nixed the idea.

She thinks Brad should be able to handle the kids on his own, like she did when he was filming in Germany, according to a source. No word on what is up with the nanny, but that was a Star story and this is from a different source. [National Enquirer]

• Jen Aniston and John Mayer have indeed broken up. [Gatecrasher]
• It's official: Dancing With The Stars is a goddamn health hazard. Now Steve-O has pinched nerves. [ET]
• Injured Jewel will sing "Somewhere Over The Rainbow" on DWTS on Tuesday. [UPI]
• Bong boy Michael Phelps's interview with Matt Lauer will air on the Today show this morning and again Sunday on Dateline. [ET]
• Here's what you're gonna hear Michael Phelps say during the interview: "mistake," "bad judgment," "stupid mistake." Wait, do you regret it? [People]
• Last week, four of the celeb weeklies put Rihanna on the cover, and none of them saw an increase in sales. Life & Style had a picture of Jennifer Aniston on the cover, and sold more than sister mag In Touch. [NY Post]
• Chris Brown's image still appears on Sony Music's website. [NY Daily News]
• Details on Mandy Moore's wedding to Ryan Adams: The bride wore a "cream-colored, lacy tea-length dress and flat sandals" and the groom wore "tight skinny jeans, a T-shirt with sport coat and sneakers." The pastor "didn't know who they were." The ceremony took eight minutes. [People]
• The woman is dead but Anna Nicole Smith's legal issues live on: Now Howard K. Stern has turned himself in for providing ANS with prescription drugs. He was arrested and booked yesterday and the charge is a felony. [TMZ, People, Fox 411]
• This report begins, "Let's stop encouraging Joaquin Phoenix's miscreant behavior - the only thing real about this rap act is the beard." [MSNBC Scoop]
• Joaquin's "brawl": "It was a fake fight," says a witness. "Nobody threw a punch. They were just holding onto each other." [Page Six]
• Here's what Hayden Panettiere has to say about that "outburst" she had on the red carpet: "I have tremendous respect for the media and reporters – particularly the press who treat the people they are interviewing with dignity. While in Hawaii, one reporter grabbed me suddenly from behind and frightened me. It happens. Typically, the press has treated me with great respect." [Ok!]
  
• Will Slumdog's Freida Pinto be the new Bond girl? Signs point to yes. [The Sun]
• Kelly Killoren Bensimon may have "beaten up" her boyfriend to make sure she stays on Real Housewives. People are saying the attack was fake. [Gatecrasher]
• Someone is leaving House. Who, who? Also, Judy Greer is in an episode next week. She says: "[My character] works at a nursing home and there's a cat, and whoever's bed the cat sleeps on dies in the next couple of days. And then one day the cat snuggled up to my character and she totally freaks out and goes to see House..." [E!]
• Miley Cyrus wanted to meet Radiohead after the Grammys. She was told they "don't do that." She says: "I left 'cause I was so upset. I wasn't going to watch them. Stinkin' Radiohead! I'm going to ruin them. I'm going to tell everyone." Radiohead responds: "When Miley grows up, she'll learn not to have such a sense of entitlement." [Mirror]
• Feel like doing a *headdesk*? Peaches Geldof will be in a reality show about her "career" at Nylon magazine. [The Sun]
• No one wants you to forget that auction documents show that Michael Jackson's house was filled with sculptures of boys. [TMZ]
• Mischa Barton has a job! She's been cast in a CW show produced by Ashton Kutcher. "Ashton developed it about his life growing up as a model from Iowa, so it's about the whole fashion world that he was in, and obviously I have a lot of friends in the fashion world, so I'm used to being around a lot of people in that," Barton says. "[I play] a bitchy model-type character, like it's a totally different character for me." [People]
• Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson did an SNL skit about Hawaii's tourist industry and now the Governor of that state is pissed. [CBS News]
• Congrats to Cesar Milan, the dog whisperer, who is now a U.S. citizen. [People]
• Hugh Hefner is selling his house. Not the Playboy Mansion — the one next door, where his wife was living. [WSJ]
• OutKast's André Benjamin says it's tough being a fashion designer because people think "hip-hop stars will just throw their names on anything." And: "I'm not a gay man." [Page Six]
• Set your DVR: Tracy Pollan (Mrs. Michael J. Fox) is playing Natalee Holloway's mom in a Lifetime movie. [USA Today]
• Nicollette Sheridan could return to Desperate Housewives after she leaves this season. The show's creator says: "I wouldn't be surprised if that's just a nasty rumour and Nicollette has more Desperate Housewives episodes in her future." [Mirror]
• Vin Diesel says his life has changed in "an incredible way" since the birth of his daughter last year. [Mirror]
• Chris Cornell not only has a new Timbaland-produced album coming out, he has a second career as a restauranteur. In Paris. [Guardian]
• A screenwriter is suing the makers of the Jane Fonda/Jennifer Lopez flick Monster-In-Law, accusing them of stealing her plot. Sorta late, no? [E!]
• Researchers with too much time on their hands have "discovered" that if you listen to U2, you're smart, and if you listen to Lil Wayne, you're not. [The Sun]
• Whatever happened to Mary Stuart Masterson? She's in a new indie called The Cake Eaters. [LA Times]
• Least blind blind item ever? "Which rapper threatened a pal after the buddy mistreated his girlfriend? The icon got in his face, then froze him out on the group's private jet." [Gatecrasher]
• "I certainly try my best not to be a terrible interview subject. But I am tortured. If you've been acting all your life, you can just talk about yourself without ever thinking about what's going on inside the head of the person that's interviewing you. But for me it's different, because I'm constantly seeing it from both sides. I don't think there's any connection between my journalism career and my film career." — Greg Kinnear. [Independent]
• "I think that the best way to judge movies is, like, 10 years after they're released. I think they should actually do the awards that way. I think they should have done the Academy Awards this year for movies from 1998. I think it's better to look at a movie and then step back and look at it again. I don't think that the awards necessarily get it right. I think they get it wrong more often than they get it right." — Matt Damon, to Parade. [MSNBC]
• "For me this thing happened so long ago and I just really wish people could move on from it. I don't live in the past. When I read headlines about me saying 'When she was 15 her mother shot her father' it's very sensational for me.It happened 18 years ago. Since then I've had a complete, full life and, my God, if I've been living the past 18 years in the past because of one event that happened in my life someone should put a gun to my head and put me out of my misery because that's a waste of my life. I am 33 and I have had a much bigger life than that one event." — Charlize Theron. [Daily Mail]
• "I'm probably a lot more boring than I used to be and more tired at night. You can't fake it. It's like when it's bedtime, it's bedtime. I go to bed earlier and I get up earlier. I think being a parent changes everything about you in really little ways and in ways that you don't really understand unless you have kids. It's kind of like describing a guitar chord - it's not really a simple thing to do." — Matt Damon, to Parade. [Mirror]
• "Before we were married, my wife and I used to play a game called Let's Go Get Lost. We'd be driving, and she would just tell me to turn. 'Turn here, turn here, turn here.' I'd say, 'Baby, I know this town too well. I can't get lost.' And she'd say, "Turn, turn, turn." Until we were out in Indian country, and they were shooting at us." — Tom Waits. [GQ]
• "I'm kind of frightened of the red carpet. I really am. And, you know, it gets worse. At one time, you could just come down the line, meet the fans, see the film and hopefully a good night is had by all. It's changed. You have people checking out your dress from the minute you step onto the carpet and then, you know, it's a hit or miss. That can be more frightening than the premiere." — Julia Roberts. [CBS News]
• "I'm currently in the writing process. I'm learning how to play music and write song, but they're comedy songs. Because I can't write music or play very well - actually, I have quite a bit of musical aptitude when it comes to the guitar, but I don't know how to write music - I'm collaborating with different artists who are giving me the music while I provide the lyrics. Two of the people I'm collaborating with will be performing with me at SXSW - Patty Griffin and Amanda Palmer [of the Dresden Dolls]. [The songs] are all pretty dirty. The titles are things like, 'I'm In Love With Someone Else So Fuck You' and 'Eat Shit and Die.'" — Margaret Cho, who is performing at SXSW… as a musician. [Time]

Washington Post:

Most every track filters Waits's sepia-toned, Charles-Bukowski-at-the-circus style dissolute folk through an echo chamber of 1985 shoegazer reverb, with Johansson's possibly quite lovely voice buried underneath, like an afterthought. The end result is strange but not unpleasant. It's like what would happen if Mazzy Star's Hope Sandoval decided to release a solo album assembled by a group of carnival barkers and hobos.

Entertainment Weekly:

Anywhere I Lay My Head, actress Scarlett Johansson's debut CD, is an extravagant act of camouflage: a covers album where the interesting objective of reimagining Tom Waits songs with Arcade Fire-type soundscapes plays second fiddle to disguising her expressionless voice. With her low monotone, ScarJo aims for Nico but comes off like Sin ad on sopors — never more so than on the zombielike ''I Don't Wanna Grow Up.'' In burying Johansson's vocals so deeply in the druggy ambiance, producer David Andrew Sitek (of TV on the Radio) means well but ends up obscuring Waits' great tunes

Pitchfork:

On several songs, Johansson gets lost in Sitek's swelling production, which may suggest a weak interpreter or a dearth of vocal personality but adds to the album's pervading dreaminess. Ultimately, her ambitions prove more musical than professional, and her willingness to make herself a secondary player here— behind Waits, Sitek, and TV on the Radio— makes the whole enterprise seem like a lark, an anti-vanity project. There are no tacky pronouncements of stars-are-just-like-you realness here, no statements about herself or her celebrity or really anything at all. The only thing we've learned about her is that she really, really likes Tom Waits. That's more than enough to avoid catastrophe, but not quite enough to make Anywhere I Lay My Head much more than a curio.

Rolling Stone:

The girl's got indie cred, no doubt. Lost in Translation wrapped her in a dynamite alt-rock soundtrack, and she's sung with the Jesus and Mary Chain. So it makes sense that, for her debut, Scarlett Johansson takes on the indestructible songbook of indie totem Tom Waits. Produced by TV on the Radio's Dave Sitek, the experimental result finds her draped, sonically speaking, in costumes as ornate as those 16th-century period gowns she rocked in The Other Boleyn Girl. It's a reasonable strategy, since Johansson's voice is unremarkable and her pitch sometimes unsteady; she's a faintly goth Marilyn Monroe lost in a sonic fog. Sometimes that's fine: "I Wish I Was in New Orleans" is carried by a haunting music-box melody, "Fannin Street" has lush choral vocals bolstered by David Bowie, and "Song for Jo" (the set's sole original) sweeps the singer along in sound whorls recalling "Tomorrow Never Knows." But the synth-pop version of "I Don't Wanna Grow Up," famously covered by the Ramones, makes you wish Joey was still around to take the mike.

Baltimore Sun:

As a singer, the actress lacks personality. Johansson's voice, often low and sometimes seductive, is inexpressive throughout. She doesn't exactly sound bored, and she sings in tune. It's just that she adds no color or texture to her vocals, letting the music do all the work. Her approach clicks on "Song for Jo," where the narcotic music and vocals become one. The sun-kissed synth-pop of "I Don't Wanna Grow Up" vaguely recalls Debbie Harry's sexy deadpan performance on the Blondie classic "Heart of Glass."

Elsewhere, Johansson just melts into the music, which isn't necessarily a bad thing.

The Times:

On Johansson's album, Dave Sitek's production heaps on dislocated synths that camouflage Johansson's voice. Under the circumstances, who would blame him if he went one better and removed it entirely? Or elected to feature more instrumentals, beyond the sonic establishing shot of Fawn? Would that a similar tactic had been deployed on Fannin St. Instead, a bleat that only a deaf mother could love is hitched to a vocal cameo from David Bowie. If you find that your estimation of Dame Dave hasn't plummeted so sharply since he yelled "South Americaaaa!" on Dancing in the Streets, you may find the opposite happening with your feelings towards Tom Waits. One can only marvel at the ability of these songs to withstand this sort of A-list attack.

Anywhere I Lay My Head is released today.