Music
Amy Rigby
Little Fugitive (Signature Sounds) Playing in-the-round Oct. 27 with Swan Dive, Don Henry and Bill Lloyd at the Bluebird CaféFormalist and passionate, utopian and small-scale, Amy Rigby’s Little Fugitive subsumes regret and desperation into a canny, spare take on 1960s pop that manages to evoke the familiar while sounding a little bent. Rigby’s sources might be Brill Building harmonies and punk rock, psychedelia and soul music, but Little Fugitive almost never descends into pastiche; in fact, the arrangements often signify when the songwriting does not.
Although Rigby’s 1996 Diary of a Mod Housewife established her as a chronicler of economic and romantic insecurity, her musical savvy was just as striking as her lyrics. Producer Elliot Easton’s use of glossy pedal steel and massed backing vocals on “Sad Tale” lent the song a grandeur that seemed both ironic and heroic in light of lyrics like “You will never get over this / You will.” On 1998’s Middlescence, “The Summer of My Wasted Youth” could have been an exercise in nostalgia, but a great string arrangement and booming drums turned it into a piece of self-examination.
Little Fugitive finds Rigby as sharp as ever, even as many of the songs evince the fuzz of dislocation (she recently moved from Nashville to Cleveland) or the exasperation of a survivor who hasn’t lost her sense of humor but knows that jokes have their limits. She compares herself to Rasputin in the opening song, runs for her life “like Dustin Hoffman” in “It’s Not Safe,” and references Blondie and the Shadows of Knight in “Dancing With Joey Ramone.”
These are good songs, but they’re also somewhat obvious. “Dancing With Joey Ramone” in particular seems like a simplification of Rigby’s art—boomer nostalgia with no particular point. Much better is “So You Know Now,” which recalls The Beatles’ “Tomorrow Never Knows.” Delivered with deadly calm, this reproof to a man who has discovered his lover’s checkered past is superb songwriting, and the Beatles reference only amplifies the song’s meaning.
“Year of the Fling,” a dissection of bohemia, couples “corset” with “force it” and is Rigby at her funniest and most mordant. The lyrics are almost too clever: “Metal clips, restraints / The secret lives of the saints.” But “Year of the Fling” is musically brilliant, a kind of deracinated blues as updated ’60s pop.
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In “The Trouble With Jeanie,” Rigby struggles with conflicted feelings about her “new husband’s ex-wife,” a woman who’s too nice to hate. “I must admit I don’t know how I’m supposed to act / She’s hugging me instead of stabbing my back,” she sings. Here again, the arrangement is tailored to Rigby’s delivery, with a harpsichord-like electric piano gently steering her to a hard-won equanimity.
The record’s closing track, Lenny Kaye’s “The Things You Leave Behind” (which Rigby says she heard Kaye perform last year at a tribute to the late guitarist Robert Quine), sums up her preoccupations: “Now I got an attic / And you’ve got a basement / Put it together and what do we see / A piece of you and a piece of me.” It’s one of the simplest and most affecting things Rigby has ever done, and a fine example of how her vocals avoid prettification while still conveying plenty of nuance.
As Deana Carter did on this year’s The Story of My Life, Rigby reimagines pop’s autobiographical mode even as she lightly mocks it. Carter’s take on Beatlesque pop comes from the country side of the fence (with interesting and somewhat incongruous touches of teen-pop), while Rigby is an all-purpose eclectic with no particular allegiance to any style. These differences aside, both women illuminate the human condition through relentless self-examination—a neat trick that has nothing to do with fashion.