Artist	Song
Amy Rigby	Time For Me To Come Down
Amy Rigby	Beer & Kisses
Amy Rigby	20 Questions
Amy Rigby	Knapsack
Amy Rigby	The Good Girls
Amy Rigby	That Tone Of Voice
Amy Rigby	All I Want
Amy Rigby	Summer Of My Wasted Youth
Amy Rigby	Raising The Bar
Amy Rigby	What I Need
Amy Rigby	As Is
Amy Rigby	Wait Til I Get You Home
Amy Rigby	Rode Hard
Amy Rigby	Balls
Amy Rigby	Stop Showing Up In My Dreams
Amy Rigby	Why Do I
Amy Rigby w/ Todd Snider	Til The Wheels Fall Off
Amy Rigby	Don't Ever Change
Amy Rigby	Are We Ever Gonna Have Sex Again
Amy Rigby	Like Rasputin
Amy Rigby	That's The Time
Amy Rigby	Dancing With Joey Ramone
Amy Rigby	I Don't Wanna Talk About Love No More

Comment:

A long overdue tribute to one of my favorite singer-songwriters. Sad to say, I totally overlooked her the first time around, but finally got around to picking up her outstanding 1996 debut Diary Of A Mod Housewife a couple months back, and was totally blown away. She'd kicked around in a couple NYC indie bands in the late '80's and early '90's, but took some time off for marriage & a kid. Her solo debut captures her divorce-in-progress (from dB's drummer Will Rigby) with some of the most funny, touching, and memorable lyrics of love & loss this side of the Magnetic Fields' Stephin Merritt. It falls mostly in a jangly alt.country vein, though with lyrics like "don't look at me in that tone of voice," she blows most of what comes out of Nashville off the map. Country vibe aside, the album's all over the place, from 60s girl-group pop ("The Good Girls") to Mountain Goats-styled acoustic earnestness ("Knapsack") to a punkish two-chord vamp a la "Sister Ray"/"Roadrunner" ("That Tone Of Voice"). Highlight: "20 Questions," a "Subterranean Homesick Blues" knock-off in which the wronged woman berates her drunken, wayward man with, yes, 20 questions -- and you're on her side until the questions start devolving into "and by the way, when are you gonna get a real job?" and maybe you feel for the guy just a bit. Plus "Beer & Kisses" is romantic as all hell.
Not surprisingly, none of her four subsequent albums had quite the start-to-finish perfection of Mod Housewife, but she has continued to come up with at least a handful of drop-dead wonderful music each go-round; if some of the lesser album tracks occasionally slip into the standard folk-pop territory better left to the Sheryl Crows and Sarah McLachlan's of the world, they're more than compensated for by the stand-out tracks. Hell, "Dancing With Joey Ramone" alone buys her another decade of goodwill. And you'd have to be a total cynic not to find songs like "That's The Time" and "Don't Ever Change" utterly tear-jerking -- yes, I really do get tears in my eyes every time I hear the latter, and I don't mind saying it. And if "Balls" and "Are We Ever Gonna Have Sex Again" don't win you over, there's really something wrong with you.
Anyway, this is a pretty complete intro to my biggest rock & roll crush since Kim Deal and Liz Phair.

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