Village Voice “Quirking Girls” by Laura Sinagra - July 2, 2003
It's still Guyville, we're just living in it. Re: Liz Phair, I can see why indie boys are mourning that notion of feminist progress symbolized by Phair's brand of major-label quirk. But c'mon, girls——where her bitches at? In trying out radio-rock (and making cheesecake bids for mainstream hot), Liz is just being honest——about the fact that for us, the world of "quirk" can be as full of shit (and compromise) as the Matrix. Anyway, I must have eaten the wrong pill, 'cause to me, "Extraordinary" is a self-love "Supernova," "Why Can't I" a sleepover anthem, "Hot White Cum" a girl's-room giggle over Mom's Cosmo.
'Course, when Liz imagines her son's confusion about her boyfriends on "Little Digger," we're nearing Amy Rigby territory: the realm of real-ass quirk. Onetime Williamsburg housewife, now off-off-Opry single mom and perennial middlescent, Rigby's Til the Wheels Fall Off (a vehicular kindred spirit to raw-rocking Brit Sally Crewe's Drive It Like You Stole It) is yet another batch of cover-ready country-pop too catchy for her own renderings and too smart for Nashville. Rigby's still raunchy for her age too, musing on "Shopping Around" that "I'm getting older/I'm getting wiser/But am I getting laid?" On "Why Do I?" she regrets "always giving in/to my evil twin," who may be advising her on "The Deal," a Carpenters vamp about striking a commitment-free sex bargain. Strings and vibes underscore "How People Are"'s relationship anxiety, and on the slow Wurlitzer-and-wah-wah "Even the Weak Survive," she coaches the brokenhearted, "A good rule of thumb/Count to five/(hundred and five)." "Don't Ever Change" maps the distance she feels from her daughter's teenage headphone world, and in the Pretenders-y "Last Request," she voices the flipside of Mountain Goats' "I hope I lie/And tell everyone you were a good wife," imploring, "Could you please pretend/that you loved me until the end?" That's quirk, my friends, and it's no Fader photo shoot.
Finding Rigby-esque resonance in hometown squalor and Les Paul squall, Wide Right's Buffalo-gal (now Brooklynite) mommy-rocker Leah Archibald cranks out big-guitar screamers about active-verb identity: shoveling your car out of the snow ("Rust Belt Girl"), checking out religious statuary ("Mary on the Half Shell"), and confronting hipsters who want her cool little hangout for their Ketel One cocktail spot ("Expensive"). With a voice that swings from Astbury to Jett, the adorable Archibald summons a storm on the stop chorus of the I'm-outta-here rager "Pete Best," and still essays nuanced topics like friendship-without-label ("If I weren't married and you weren't gay/ We'll just have to find another way") and a rock-n-roll road trip complete with parenting ("The kids will sleep for the whole time/ grownup music for the enti-yer ride!"). Evoking nostalgia for that "Fireman's Fair," where we'd "hang out in the beer tent" and win some goldfish, she leaves no doubt that we really can't go back. For some of us, forward means quirking out at Southpaw. For others it means engaging the Matrix.
Seattle WeeklyJuly 16 - 22, 2003
Music Preview: Lucinda Williams and Amy Rigby
The curse of the songwriter’’s songwriter.
by Michaelangelo Matos
The music business is a minefield of backhanded compliments, with few areas more treacherous than the language used to describe artists. Clichéés like "critics' darling" or "difficult genius" often mask less benign mirror images; they're nicer ways of saying, "She doesn't sell records," or, "No one can stand him but he sells a lot of records." But there may be no biz-speak phrase more obliquely damning than "songwriter's songwriter," which too often translates into either "The lyrics are really self-involved" or "Good for you in a genteel, boring way, like Merchant-Ivory films or plain granola" or, most damaging of all, "Good composer, but she can't perform to save her life."
Lucinda Williams and Amy Rigby are songwriter's songwriters; they're critics' darlings, too, for that matter. (Williams' "difficulties" will be dealt with later.) But their best lyrics have a rare empathetic reach, their best records are a lot of fun, and both women tend to sing their own material better than anyone else. Actually, it's hard to say for sure with Rigby, since her songbook hasn't garnered many covers yet. Williams, on the other hand, watched Patty Loveless run "The Night's Too Long" up the country top 20 only months after Williams released it on 1988's Lucinda Williams, her third disc, and Mary Chapin Carpenter would later make the country top five covering the same album's "Passionate Kisses." Carpenter and Loveless had the hits, but Williams' versions, simultaneously tossed off and indelible, were the keepers.
Of course, that offhand quality was anything but——for years, Williams was more famous for her recording-studio perfectionism than her music itself. Yet most studio obsessives don't create live-sounding roots-rock. Trent Reznor is easy to recognize as a studio rat——his constant tinkering is evident in every second of Nine Inch Nails' albums. Listen to Lucinda Williams or 1992's Sweet Old World or 1998's gold-certified commercial breakthrough, Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, and you'll hear a very high-quality version of what you might hear any night of the week at a tavern. Except, of course, the songs were written by, you know, a songwriter's songwriter.
ON 2001'S ESSENCE and the new World Without Tears (Lost Highway), Williams appears to be deliberately moving away from her old work methods' precision. The music on Tears is a lot looser than usual; the band, a simple quartet led by Williams' rhythm guitar, hits a relaxed groove on almost every song. It may be the most intimate music she's ever made. The new songs also feel more impulsive, both in their subject matter (the 50-year-old Williams is a more overt horndog than she was at 35, and good for her) and in their construction. Tears abounds with near-rhymes——"Sugarcane" with "queen," "dis me" with "kissin' me," "mood" with "good"——like she is verbally letting her hair down. Then she messes it around by slurring her words and drawing out her Lake Charles, La., accent until it threatens to wander off completely. Which can get annoying, actually: Yes, Lucinda, we know you're from the South. Car Wheels on a Gravel Road has so many songs named after Southern cities that it's practically a Rand McNally tribute album. But lift your tongue to the roof of your mouth every once in a while, just for appearances' sake, would ya?
Then again, the material suits the approach. Much of World Without Tears is pointedly downcast, like the gloomy, muttered, last-call laments of "American Dream," which ends every stanza with a simple "Everything is wrong," or "Minneapolis," in which Williams moans, "You're a bad pain in my gut/I wanna spit you out." So many songs sound like they're meant to sum it all up that if you play the album in the background, almost every song——from about "Overtime," the disc's fifth track, onward——sounds like it must be the last song on the album. It can be hypnotic, but just as often, Williams sounds like she's in a holding pattern, her embittered, wildly romantic lyrical persona hardening into shtick.
AMY RIGBY'S LYRICAL guise, on the other hand, just keeps on giving. A former member of cheeky early-'90s indie girl group the Shams, Rigby's solo debut, 1996's Diary of a Mod Housewife, laid her out: a shakily married Brooklyn woman with a wry sense of humor, bouncing between temp jobs, nightclubs, and her husband and child. Two years and one divorce later, the title of her second album, Middlescence, summed up her stance: an adult who felt younger than her years and was more than a little tired of struggling to get by.
Now living in Nashville with her daughter and shopping her songs around to people as famous as she deserves to be, the 44-year-old Rigby still mines the same topics. But the new Til the Wheels Fall Off (Signature Sounds) keeps finding ways to make them new——partly because good songs about sexless marriages and watching your kids grow up are rare enough, partly because few songwriters are as pointed, whatever the subject. Or as funny: Wheels' instant classic is the blunt "Are We Ever Gonna Have Sex Again?" in which Rigby admonishes her long-standing partner, "Screw making love/It's way too ambitious/Let's get down on the rug/ After you've finished the dishes/Not now, hon, the eggs are frying/But you get extra points for trying/Maybe I can squeeze you in/Between the PTA and CNN." If there's any justice in the world——or, an even longer bet, in Nashville——someone with a big voice and bigger hair will take it top 20 country pronto.
All Music Guide - March 2003 - Four Stars - Til The Wheel Fall Off - Amy Rigby - (Signature Sounds)
The consistent strength of Amy Rigby's albums sometimes makes them just a bit difficult to write about — each of her albums is loaded with witty and telling songs about the occasional pleasures and frequent pitfalls of life as a single woman past 30 (or, these days, past 40), and her slightly rickety but powerful voice and smart, tuneful melodies make the perfect vehicle for her material. Rigby's fourth album, Till the Wheels Fall Off, fits right in alongside her previous three sets, so what is there to say about this disc that hasn't been said about the others? Well, just as important as the consistency of Rigby's music is the fact she knows how to find any number of variations on her basic themes, and like the best singer/songwriters, she knows that each person can have any number of stories to tell, and she knows how to tell them with humor, clarity, and an emotional honesty that's both affecting and disarming. That's what made her first three albums so special, and makes Til the Wheels Fall Off just as impressive; much like John Prine, Richard Thompson, and Loudon Wainwright III, Rigby appears to be the sort of songwriter who has the gift of consistent excellence, and if that makes sorting out the value of one album over the other a tad difficult, it also means that they're all rewarding listening. Anyone who ever smiled or cringed at the home truths of Rigby's songs will get a laugh out of "Are We Ever Gonna Have Sex Again" and the title track, and have their heartstrings tugged by "Don't Ever Change" and "Why Do I." In short, Amy Rigby has made her fourth great album, and with any luck she won't stop doing this anytime soon.
Mark Deming
Columbus Dispatch July 19, 2003
A divorced, 44-year-old mother of one, Rigby is more "rock'' than the hordes of slinky, leather-clad guitar boys half her age. She's done some hard livin' and has a weary, worn-in lilt to her voice, but she hasn't lost her sense of humor and wonder. What's more, she can whip out songs that comfortably call to mind Cole Porter, the Byrds and early Yo La Tengo. Songs from Til The Wheels Fall Off, such as Are We Ever Going To Have Sex Again and Breakup Boots, despite their campy delivery, are bittersweet pills of country-rock and Brill Building pop.
Washington Post - April 2003
by Shannon Zimmerman
Lousy relationships can make for terrific albums. Bitterness and recrimination are the stuff of great lyrics, after all, and threaded through a hook-laden chorus, a little self-loathing can go a long way.
Just ask Amy Rigby -- particularly about the self-loathing. On "Why Do I," the first cut on her new album, "Til the Wheels Fall Off," the Nashville-based singer-songwriter waxes pathetic: "Why do I get off on misery?" Rigby asks, even though she knows the answer: "Loneliness feels good to me."
In lesser hands, this sad-sack routine would be a hard sell. But like Rigby's three previous discs, "Wheels" is a keeper thanks mainly to her knack for tucking trenchant insights into shower-worthy melodies. On "Shopping Around," Rigby makes like an Everly sister, singing in a heartbroken warble over brightly strummed acoustic guitars and sun-drenched backing harmonies. "The Deal" serves up a gorgeous, Burt Bacharach-style melody while a couple negotiates their escape clause: "If things get weird, we can always bail." And on the twangy title track, Rigby and her boyfriend fight it out over a fat guitar riff, slurred trombones and big splashes of soap-opera organ.
Strong as the disc is, longtime fans may get the sense that they've been here before. Rigby's new tunes occasionally echo old ones, and the likably neurotic character she's cultivated throughout her career surely deserves a good therapist by now.
Then again, mental health could deprive this chronic malcontent of her creative inspiration. So, long may Rigby mope -- she's pop's sweetest cynic.
NO DEPRESSIONMay 2003
Philip Larkin wrote that in all people there sleeps a sense of how their lives might have been different, had they been loved. “Nothing changes that,” he concluded. Amy Rigby’s fourth album alternates between awakening that sense and trying to bury it.
Like her previous work, Til The Wheels Fall Off frames Rigby’s scuffles with existence, romance and endurance in a sturdy pop-rock format. She wears this unconventionally and well, not despite but precisely because of the cracks experience have inflicts upon her pretty, wavering voice. Against the attitudinally challenged post-pubescents and creatively challenged oldsters normally drawn to the style, Rigby contrasts brightly.
And while she can develop lyrical twists worthy of Elvis Costello and hooks that could plausibly claim Brill Building origins, Rigby hits her stride when she treats those qualities as useful quirks, then focuses on the basics. Snappy surf-band organ never slows the breezy pace Rigby and Todd Snider set for the title track; kitsch background – harpsichord, campy retro tempo, other thefts from the Burt Bacharach playbook – merely dresses up the tentative hopes and wishes of “The Deal”; vibes and swelling strings leave room for the deluge of tenderness in “How People Are”.
The instrumental touches conform to Rigby’s varied moods: confused (“Shopping Around”), sympathetic (“Even The Weak Survive”), yearning (“Don’t Ever Change”). By the time she achieves happiness with the airy “All The Way To Heaven”, Rigby has compressed the facets of these songs into a single, gem-luminous sense of how different life is when one actually is, and feels, beloved.Jon M. Gilbertson
PasteMusic.com - April 2003
Having released three albums of witty, tuneful root-pop to great critical acclaim and a growing cult audience, Amy Rigby's Signature debut Til The Wheels Fall Off has all the makings of a breakthrough. The album is a masterpiece of adult pop, conjuring up classic 60's pop anthems while remaining completely contemporary and offering the sharpest lyrics this side of Elvis Costello. Rigby's autobiographical tunes, by turns funny and poignant, are the stuff of which careers like Lucinda Williams are made, and Rigby is long overdue for some Williams-like recognition.
Ink 19 - May 2003
Amy Rigby has moved to more rustic territory, releasing what is surely her finest album to date. Til The Wheels Fall Off once again proves to the world what a great songwriter Rigby is, and the album broadens her musical scope as much as it consolidates what she's been doing up until this point.
Her cracked, slightly trembling voice adds even more poignancy and profundity to tales about trying to find some truth in a fucked-up world -- songs about coping with the tragedies of everyday living. Musically, she's as individual and idiosyncratic as ever. She's steeped in rootsy Americana, for sure, but takes in everything from the Beatles and Motown to alt-country, psych pop and new wave.
"Why Do I" is an absolutely stunning opening track, somewhat reminiscent of what Wilco was doing a couple of years ago. "Shopping Around" sounds like Elvis Costello in country mode, "The Deal" is a splendid surf-y Beach Boys moment, while the irresistible "O'Hare" echoes Springsteen's 1970's songwriting (if not his arrangements). Although their approaches are very different from each other, Rigby isn't all that unlike pin-up folkster Bright Eyes (note the melodic similarities on songs like "Why Do I" and "Even The Weak Survive."
A compassionate and brave artist, Rigby is one of Americana's finest young songwriters, in the process of carving out a style of her own. Til The Wheels Fall Off is her finest achievement yet and, frankly, the first essential folk-pop album of 2003.
July 16 - 22, 2003
