Scarlett Johansson sings the hits

Actress Scarlett Johansson is to launch herself as a singer, with a debut album featuring covers of songs by idiosyncratic balladeer Tom Waits. Johansson, star of Lost in Translation and Girl with a Pearl Earring, collaborated with Yeah Yeah Yeahs guitarist Nick Zinner, Celebration's Sean Antanaitis and TV On The Radio's Dave Sitek, on Anywhere I Lay My Head, which takes its name from the title of a Waits track from his classic 1985 album Rain Dogs. It was recorded over five weeks at Dockside Studios in Maurice, Lousiana, and is due to be released in May.

Meanwhile the 23-year-old actress has just returned from a five-day 'meet the troops' tour of the Gulf where she signed autographs but didn't sing. According to a report in Marine Corps News: "A hush fell over the crowd as Johansson, wearing a pink sweater, knee-high boots and cherry-red lipstick, entered the USO [at Camp Buehring in Kuwait]."
 
Johansson, who last year was voted the star with the sexiest body in the world, said: "If they are missing home, feeling down or worried, hopefully being here will get their minds off of things." Her next film is The Other Boleyn Girl, in which she stars opposite Natalie Portman.
 
As for Tom Waits, he may not be a chart-topper, but the artist with a voice once described as sounding "like it was soaked in a vat of bourbon, left hanging in the smokehouse for a few months and then taken outside and run over with a car", has a cult following and his songs have been recorded by Bruce Springsteen and Rod Stewart. Waits is also an actor and was in the middle of production on The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus, when co-star Heath Ledger died earlier this week. ·