No Promises

1	Those Dancing Days Are Gone 3:41
2	Before the World Was Made 3:51
3	Lady Weeping at the Crossroads 3:37
4	I Felt My Life With Both My Hands 2:55
5	Promises Like Pie-Crust 2:33
6	Autumn 3:24
7	If You Were Coming in the Fall 3:32
8	I Went to Heaven 2:48
9	Afternoon 2:07
10	Ballade at Thirty-Five 3:03
11	At Last the Secret Is Out 5:43
12	[Untitled] CD-Rom Track

Barnes & Noble

On No Promises, former supermodel (and current wife of French president Nicolas Sarkozy) Carla Bruni sets poems by Emily Dickinson, W. B. Yeats, Dorothy Parker, and Christina Rossetti, among others, to music. Bruni's breathy delivery matches her looks, which is to say, it deserves your attention. Highlights include a rendition of Dickinson's poem "I Went to Heaven."

All Music Guide

After the runaway success of her charming, folksy first album, Quelqu'un M'a Dit, Carla Bruni's sophomore effort takes a more difficult route and sees her setting canonical works by such poets as Yeats and Emily Dickinson to music. The lines "Wrapping that foul body up/In as foul a rag" in Yeats' "Those Dancing Days Are Gone" are delivered almost winsomely, where in fact the word "foul" should be allowed to drag, and to weigh down the rest of the line. Metered verse cannot fit this sort of verse-verse-chorus model. Of course, an album must be judged on its musical merits, and the overall mixture of rhythm and pedal steel guitars, with a touch of harmonica here and there, is a serviceable foil to Bruni's smoky voice. Although this impersonal set of disparate poems is often set to incongruous arrangements, the doo wop piano-and-guitar jam on Dickinson's "If You Were Coming in the Fall" is a highlight, lending itself oddly well to Bruni's sauce. Caspar Salmon

New York Sun

Ms. Bruni, 39, has a small, husky voice whose charm lies in its tousled, just-got-out-of-bed timbre. She recently told the Times of London that she began reading English and American poetry in order to find inspiration for her own songwriting. And then the idea came simply to record the poems she was reading. Brendan Bernhard