Amy Rigby | "Diary of a Mod Housewife" | (KOCH International)
By JOYCE MILLMAN
Country music has always readily acknowledged the kinds of lives real people lead. From Loretta Lynn's "One's on the Way" to Tammy Wynette's "D-I-V-O-R-C-E" to George Jones' "A Good Year for the Roses" to Mary Chapin Carpenter's "He Thinks He'll Keep Her," country elevates to monumental the subjects rock 'n' roll might rashly consider mundane — the hard work of raising kids, supporting a family, and keeping a marriage going as romance falls farther down the list of priorities. Maybe it's the music's inherent populism or maybe it's the premium it places on storytelling, but a lot of country sounds like music made by grown-ups who've been there and back.
Amy Rigby is just such a grown-up. Rigby's debut solo CD "Diary of a Mod Housewife" is country in sound as well as spirit, and it doesn't even matter that she's an old punk from New York's East Village — on this record, she's goddamn Loretta Lynn. Rigby, who's in her late 30s, put out previous records with the New York cowpunk band Last Roundup and the Shams, a "post-modern girl group," as she describes them in her self-penned press bio. She has a spunky, wobbly voice like Carlene Carter and a way with a pop hook like Nick Lowe, which is why she's on an indie label — she may be too rock for Nashville and too Nashville for rock.
The type of mundane/monumental domestic vignettes Rigby lays out on "Diary of a Mod Housewife" have been attempted by a few brave married rockers before: X's "Wild Gift" comes to mind, with its harrowing tales of a couple, a vow and every kind of temptation imaginable. ("Wild Gift" is a country album in punk clothing.) Rigby doesn't go in for such doomed heroics, though. "Mod Housewife" is homey — homespun, even — and without a trace of studied rock-star glamor. Rigby sounds like a woman past the point of caring whether or not she's cool. She's got more important things to worry about — a kid, a stack of bills. She's real, and many listeners will find her plenty familiar.
In her liner notes (more like a liner manifesto), she writes, "You may be asking yourself — what is a mod housewife? It is a woman being dragged kicking and screaming into adulthood... Stuck in the netherworld between bohemia and suburbia, between set lists and shopping lists. You've probably seen her at the supermarket with her kid in a grocery cart, headphones blasting Elastica while she debates the merits of low-fat granola bars vs. Snackwells. Maybe you've seen her pushing a toddler in a swing, with a fading ink stamp on her hand from some club the night before... She still wants to rock, and still knows how. She understands compromise. But she's not ready to give in ... yet."
Like the famous soccer moms, the women Rigby speaks directly to — and for — are everywhere, yet have long been treated as if invisible. "Mod Housewife" is as liberating as the first Pretenders record was, voicing womanly concerns with no punches pulled. This is a record that feels so lived in, it hurts. Rigby's 12 perfect, unpretentious songs about a shaky marriage (to former dB's percussionist Will Rigby) and unfulfilled ambition were scribbled between office temp jobs and bar gigs (in one published interview, she recalls driving home from her shows with her little daughter Hazel asleep in the back seat). In her bio, Rigby calls "Mod Housewife" "music to wash dishes by."
Produced by former Cars guitarist Elliot Easton, "Mod Housewife" is the kind of literate pop that could make a killing in Nashville, although her band is more elastic, her voice more wayward, than anything coming out of the Nashville mainstream. She's more in step with the eclectic country pop-rock of John Hiatt, Marshall Crenshaw, and Lucinda Williams. She does early-Beatles-type guitar raves, authentic Nashville domestic soap operas, and unplugged confessionals, and she hits the mark on all of them.
But what I love best about "Mod Housewife" is Rigby's lyrics and the world of responsibility and spouseness and momhood she illuminates, dust bunnies and all. Rigby's ironic title makes you think how, even though women's lives have changed since our mothers' time, that weird, awful word "housewife" still sometimes says it all. Oh, we know that our fears of growing a housedress and a Ray Conniff record collection when we married or became moms were unfounded. But there's still the exhausting grind of cooking and cleaning and parenting on top of the work we do for a paycheck, and it saps the generosity and good humor out of people — out of couples.
You won't hear a more honest song about the never-ending mood swings of being married with children than "Down Side of Love," which has the childlike lilt of a Buddy Holly love song, if Buddy had lived to be 40 and stayed married to Maria Elena. Rigby condenses the big picture into aching couplets, sung with the hint of a sob in her voice, like a tear too proud to fall: "We have a shared history/ but we miss mystery/that's the down side of love."
But the knock-down, straight-up highlight of "Mod Housewife" is the twangy "Beer & Kisses," a duet sung with John Wesley Harding that's a Tammy Wynette and George Jones-worthy mini-masterpiece of humor and kicked-in-the-gut realism. "Beer & Kisses" is about a couple who meet in a supermarket, fall madly in love ("We lived on beer and kisses/ all hopped up on love and foam"), move in together, have a kid and then try to live happily ever after. But the real leading character of the song is the couple's couch, where the stages of their relationship are played out.
"Come home from work/turn on the light/sit on the couch/spend the whole night there," they croon at first blush, and you imagine them making out in a beery haze. After they "grew a little couch potato," the "beer and kisses didn't flow so free." Instead, they'd come home from work and get in a fight; he'd drink his beer alone in the kitchen, she'd have the couch to herself (come to think of it, X had a song about a couch, too). In the last verse, the woman proposes that they start over and asks him to pick up a six-pack so they can "come home from work/ make it all right/ sit on the couch/ spend the whole night there." And, from your own couch, you hope that they can hang in there.
Sadly, Amy and Will Rigby didn't make it; they broke up while the album was being recorded. So now, the last track, "We're Stronger than That," Rigby's litany of things her marriage has withstood — "The fairy tales, diaper pails, lack of heat, urge to cheat/ Shattered hopes, tired jokes, doctor bills, urge to kill" — sounds less like a triumphant declaration than a poignant wish.
But the bust-up of her marriage doesn't make "Diary of a Mod Housewife" any less valid, or amazing. It's still a big-hearted and emotionally forthright statement about how hard the simplest things in life turn out to be. "You will never get over this, you will never get over this," goes Rigby's mantra of a chorus on "Sad Tale." "You will sometimes get over this, you will never get over this, you will never get over this, you will never get over this, you will."
VILLAGE VOICEOctober 1996
by Robert Christgau
Diary of a Mod Housewife [Koch, 1996]
Personalizing the political for a bohemia that coexists oh so neatly with structural underemployment, thinking harder about marriage than a dozen Nashville homilizers, the ex-Sham leaves the comforts of amateurism for an ex-Car and some El Lay roots-rockers, throwing her voice around in the process. All the ones you notice at first--the Berryesque "20 Questions," the chartworthy "Beer and Kisses," the lovelorn "Knapsack," and the thematic "The Good Girls"--were laid down in California. But the ones you don't notice you remember, including the five where she returns to reliable locals like Tony Maimone, Doug Wygal, and her hub, who in his real-life version even gets to bang things on a couple of songs. Concept album of the year. A
Dancing About Architecture:Top Ten CDs of the Decade
by Peter Gorman
10. Amy Rigby: Diary of a Mod Housewife
Great songs performed superbly, hearing this makes one think, "she knows from where she sings." The production is slick but nothing else is, and it all seems to fit.
SPIN
October 1996
Amy Rigby, Diary Of A Mod Housewife
Even the most fabulous among us have ordinary feelings sometimes. Hipsters worry about hair loss; punk rockers miss their moms.
Most shockingly, these people nearly always grow up, fingernails clinging to the cliff of nonconformity as they slide toward a normal life. "TV shows, runny nose, wedding ring, same old thing," warbles veteran cool girl Amy Rigby on her debut solo album, Diary of a Mod Housewife. "Baby, we're stronger than that."
Rigby, formerly in the '80s cowpunk outfit Last Roundup and later the womanly girl-group the Shams, is a wife all right, married to ex-dB's drummer Will Rigby. But calling herself a housewife is a joke that casts an ironic glow around her genuine concerns: the unambitious pursuit of happiness and the maintenance of love. Rigby is most insightful about little folks on the edge of cool: the temp worker who pines for a bookstore clerk in "Knapsack," the tipsy Fred and Ethel of "Beer & Kisses," the not-so-newlyweds of "Down Side of Love." She gives these characters life within songs that sound like Top 40 tunes, but a little more ragged, saved from blandness by their thrift-store charm.
by David Cohen,
The Nando Times
Amy Rigby - Diary Of A Mod Housewife
In 1970, Carrie Snodgress starred in "Diary of a Mad Housewife," the story of a woman unraveling under the pressures of domestic life. Noted singer-songwriter Neil Young found himself so moved by her plight that he wrote a song about the movie. Young and Snodgress ended up living together, an odd juxtaposition of art and life.
A quarter-century later, 30-something singer-songwriter Amy Rigby cast herself as the protagonist of "Diary of a Mod Housewife," a woman trying to retain a semblance of hipness under the pressures of a domestic life. While there seemed to be less at stake on Rigby's recording than in the Frank Perry film, Rigby's 12 songs, focusing as they did on self-awareness and relationships, certainly hit home.
"I've been a mod housewife since 1993 when I decided I was not going to get down on my hands and knees and scrub the bathroom floor unless I could get up on stage and sing about it," Rigby said in the liner notes. "Somehow going to work at a crappy job made more sense if I could look at it as ... research." Her CD, appropriately, was designed to look like a checkerboard tablecloth.
Rigby, formerly of the Last Roundup and Shams, was married to drummer Will Rigby (of the dB's, a seminal Eighties power pop band) at the time of this recording. In songs that have one solid foot in country music and one in power pop, Amy Rigby's concerns seemed to be less those of household drudgery than of surrendering the qualities that made her youthful and vivacious, of vanishing into her marriage and never being heard from again.
"TV shows, runny nose, wedding ring, same old thing," she sings at one point. At another point, she longs to tell the store clerk for whom she pines in "Knapsack" that she's not just another "soulless jerk." She, after all, has a band. ("He took my knapsack and his fingers brushed my wrist. Gave me a number but it wasn't even his," she sings longingly at one point.) The song ends with her unable to say anything to him.
Rigby also seemed concerned about issues surrounding the "wife" part of the word "housewife" - some of the best songs on the album dealt with arguments. "20 Questions" has her interrogating her wayward spouse as he arrives home drunk and smelling of perfume. "That Tone of Voice" is a bouncy number about her husband's inability to speak his mind when angry: "Don't look at me in that tone of voice!" she admonishes repeatedly. "That tingling feeling when you're first holding hands," she sings in "Down Side of Love," "gives way to dealing with a list of demands." Tellingly, the Rigbys soon found themselves separated.
By her next recording, 1998's "Middlescence," Rigby was singing about the difficulties of dating as a single mom. Still, the self-esteem issues were there as well: The title referred to her self-proclaimed status somewhere between adolescence and midlife maturity.
Like "Diary of a Mod Housewife," "Middlescence" crackled with finely crafted power pop/country songs, but failed to find a niche in the marketplace. In an era of so-called "divas" so successful that they are instantly recognizable even when identified only by their first names - Alanis, Celine, Mariah, Whitney, Shania - success has managed to elude the much more down-to-earth Amy Rigby. Still she has proved with her songs that, indeed, she is no "soulless jerk."
by Ed Hewitt,
@Country
Amy Rigby - Diary Of A Mod Housewife
I almost missed Rigby's unusual, heady solo debut, as, despite Greg Leisz's steel guitar licks down in the mix, the first track on the album sounds like the Bangles. But I kept listening, and you should keep reading, because Rigby is a bonafide urban New York City mother and homemaker who is closer to the pulse of the lifestyle that gives country music its best artists -- life as it's lived -- than any suburban twangin', hat-wearin' in a swanky studio, Perrier-on-the-rider swillin' New Country act. But enough mud-slinging, because she's way better than that, in songs about sitting at home, work, crushes, parenting, getting older, and the moment when the rose-colored glasses come off.
"Beer & Kisses," a duet with John Wesley Harding, takes on the boozin' song genre with a slice of life more real than anything surfing the middle of the radio band these days: "Get home from work / Make it alright / Sit on the couch / Spend the whole night there." "Knapsack" portrays a mature woman's girlish crush with a personal touch, and you know Rigby is "writing what she knows." Rigby's homey vocals convey honesty and experience rather than technique, although she's certainly not sloppy or unskilled.
"20 Questions" sounds like a Highway 61 Revisited outtake in which Rigby asks every last one of her 20 questions (count 'em) in three minutes and 18 seconds of tough-skinned hilarity, in which she gets progressively softer, but not before taking one last swipe. While Rigby has opened for Dwight Yoakam, James McMurtry and Bill Monroe, and appeared on Ernest Tubb's Midnight Jamboree, she is as enamored of 60s folk rock (Joni Mitchell, The Byrds, Bob Dylan) as she is of the country tradition, but she can turn a phrase with the best Music Row writers: "Don't look at me with that tone of voice" ("That Tone Of Voice").
by Jeff Lindholm , Dirty Linen
April/May 1997, Issue #69
Amy Rigby, Diary of a Mod Housewife
Rigby's provided the soundtrack for all the mod housewives, women who're trying to figure out how to stay out all night rockin' and then get the kids off to school. Guitar in hand, she reveals tales of beer and kisses on the couch, that cute guy at the bookstore, and asks all the hard questions that she's no longer afraid to ask, like 'When do we start getting old?' The album ends with "We're Stronger Than That." That, of course, is "fairy tales, diaper pails, lack of heat, urge to cheat, shattered hopes, tired jokes." There's a country ache in her voice that's backed by a strong, new wavish band featuring members of The Cars, They Might Be Giants and Yo La Tango. This diary holds together many different tales to brilliantly illuminate the live of mod housewife Rigby, producing a true concept album.
Sunday, March 23, 1997
Dear diary
By DAVE VEITCH
Calgary Sun
DIARY OF A MOD HOUSEWIFE -- Amy Rigby (Koch): When Liz Phair enters her late 30s and finds herself married with children and living in suburbia, she can only hope to write an album as poignant and penetrating as Diary, an autobiographical account of a boho-turned-housewife grappling with the passions of youth and the responsibilities and realities of adulthood. Rigby's songs -- sometimes funny, sometimes angry, often bittersweet and hopeful -- are filled with the intimate details of ordinary life, yet there's nothing ordinary about her ability to write couplets as incisive as: "That tingling feeling when you're first holding hands/ Gives way to dealing with a list of demands." Whether she's interrogating her philandering husband (20 Questions) or lamenting a marriage that's turning into a loveless union (Beer and Kisses, a heart-wrenching duet with John Wesley Harding), Rigby's country-rock-folk numbers will strike a chord in anyone still struggling to be a grown-up. Rating: HHHHH
Sunday, March 16, 1997
Aged to perfection
Amy Rigby marries youthful exuberance, maturity
By PAUL CANTIN - Ottawa Sun
DIARY OF A MOD HOUSEWIFE
by Amy Rigby
5 (Out of five)
The eternal problem with rock 'n' roll is it rarely grants dignity and maturity -- for both player and listener.
It's as if, when you enter professional life, marriage, parenthood or your mid-30s, you're expected to check in your youthful values like a new convict surrenders his wallet and car keys.
The rarely acknowledged truth is, life goes on. Amy Rigby knows this and can write ever-so-vividly about the no-woman's-land between exuberance and awkward adulthood. That she sets these gorgeously rendered songs against a sublime blend of roots-rock and early New York punk (expertly produced by Cars guitarist Elliot Easton) is a titanic bonus.
Listen on Knapsack as Rigby spins a whole world of ideas and feelings out of a single encounter with a bookstore security clerk. Or the real-world romance of Beer & Kisses (a duet of John Wesley Harding) and the fire-spitting 20 Questions. Rigby is ready to kick and scream all the way into maturity.
As I listen to these 12 songs, I came to the gradual realization that I had long ago given up hope that someone could make a record like this. Thank heavens someone still is.
toronto eye - 06.26.97
In your own sweet time
PREVIEW:
AMY RIGBY
Friday, June 27. Reverb, 651 Queen W.
BY CINDY MCGLYNN
It's all more important than she thinks, I'm telling Amy Rigby as she takes a lunchbreak from temping at CBS' legal services.
CBS is one of her favorite gigs, where protecting the integrity of "the eye" logo is apparently such a big task, they need temps to come in and pick up the slack. The work's OK, she says, sounding tired, explaining how it means she's flexible enough to take care of her daughter, pound out her hurting cow-punk mama songs, tour some and still find time to slip into a leopard-print pants for a SPIN shoot. And that, getting back to my earlier point, is more important than she thinks.
As a girl who's slowly slouching toward the procreation years and feeling marvel and confusion over the fact that my bicycle, my Batgirl shirt and my sneakers have not begun the slow evolution into a mini-van, a Northern Reflections sweatshirt and Aerosoles ("oooooh, they come in so many styles now"), I find her nothing short of fascinating.
Because if Aerosoles and mini-vans are not what happens when you have kids then I know I'm not the only woman who doesn't know what does. Excepting a brief reappearance by Paula Yates, there's a dearth of role models for funky chicks with bambinos and attitude and brains. In my books that makes a woman like Amy Rigby as significant as she is sassy.
Rigby shyly acknowledges the notion that she may be a role model, and leaves me with the impression that it wasn't what she had in mind, but if it's a job that needs doing -- and she can leave at 5 and have flex time -- she'd be willing to give it a go. "I feel like that stuff's there for people if they choose to notice what's going on around them," Rigby says, talking about her own sense of the drama and richesse of the ordinary that abounds on her album, Diary Of A Mod Housewife (drooled on by critics everywhere). "And if they don't... that's OK. It's not everybody's job. I guess I feel like it's kinda my job to do that."
Rigby (formerly of N.Y. band The Shams and ex-wife of ex-dB Will Rigby) writes crisp, downtown-girl country songs where good girls hopefully down a "second cup of coffee 'cause it's the only available sin" and look for a ray of sunshine in the lining of a $30 dress. They dream about the bag boy at the bookstore as he lets his fingers brush over theirs and lament loving someone more when he was just someone they had in mind. Like before he came home smelling like an insert from a woman's magazine.
She has a crisp, observant and often dead funny turn of phrase, and a knack for deceptively simple and deliciously round, balanced compositions, exemplified beautifully by songs like "Knapsack" and "20 Questions."
The 37-year-old single mom makes this playfully-mature-woman business sound... if not easy, then at least damned interesting. The personal force (sometimes impish, sometimes aggressive) underlying even her most subtle songs, Rigby says, comes with the freedom that comes with age. "It's hard to explain but I played a show the other night and I was having the best time onstage and I just felt like I was the closest to being like I was when I was like 11 than I've ever been. Where I didn't feel self conscious about my body or myself as a female. I just felt good about myself. I think it's that feeling that girls have before they get to puberty, where it doesn't matter what the boys think about you. It lets you be free in a way that unless you're a super-healthy person with no neurosis, you just don't feel."
The ability to make actual, regular life seem so gosh-darned interesting is powerful and rare. Ill pass on the advice I gleaned from Robertson Davies' Bred In The Bone (I command you to override the Fifth Business high school flashback hell and keep reading), which is this: live in your own time. You know, don't lament for too long the fact that you're not some socialite in pre-war Paris and go see Lost World and eat a stuffed-crust pizza and get the good times rolling now, kids. It always struck me as sound advice.
Amy Rigby adds her own, again, deceptively simple spin to that. It's a good idea to live in your own time and an equally good one -- kids, leopard pants, weird jobs and all -- to live in your own life.
Nov. 1996