The Ultimate Rock Girl Next Door
Renowned songwriter Amy Rigby’s upcoming fifth album, Little Fugitive, finds the singer, who began her solo career as the Mod Housewife, bringing it all back home. Hailed for her keen eye and sharp wit in tracing the vagaries and victories of modern romance, her new Signature Sounds release finds Rigby promising "I Don't Want To Talk About Love No More." But, of course, she does - getting to the heart of the matter and the heart of the punch line in due course.
For the making of Little Fugitive, Rigby returned to New York City, where she emerged as a solo artist in 1996 with Diary Of A Mod Housewife, a critically acclaimed album that prompted Spin magazine to declare her "Songwriter of the Year" and was voted No. 8 in the annual Village Voice Pazz & Jop critics poll.
The result is a collection that continues to prove Rigby to be the ultimate rock girl next door – strong-willed, sharp-tongued and ready to wrestle you to the barroom floor. Yet it also reflects the wisdom of a grown woman who has made her mark as a consummate artist, penning songs with an emotional honesty and rare incisive humor. And on Little Fugitive, Rigby feels free to color in the songs with stylistic splashes from bright folk chords to stomping rock and 60’s psychedelia.
Rigby grew up in Pittsburgh but ended up in New York soon enough, attending art school amidst the fertile downtown scene of the late 1970s. She describes herself as a "casual listener" before happening upon CBGB’s, the legendary punk rock club on the Bowery. "That was the turning point," she explains. "Suddenly, I was more actively involved with music. I was a part of a scene. And music became the motivating force in my life." She revisits that heady time on "Dancing With Joey Ramone."
By the early 1980s, Rigby had taken up the guitar and was writing songs, playing and singing with her brother and some friends in Last Roundup, an urban country string band that recorded an album for Rounder Records, toured the U.S., and was a precursor of the Americana movement a decade later. She followed that with another group, the all female folk-pop trio The Shams, who released an album and EP on the trendsetting Matador label. And she married and had a child.
Marriage, motherhood and divorce informed her solo debut Diary Of A Mod Housewife (produced by former Cars guitarist Elliot Easton). It earned her considerable musical acclaim as well as becoming a text for women's studies courses, marking Rigby as a musical voice for thoroughly modern women (and the men that love them).
She has since built a catalog of releases that are "all terrific," according to Robert Christgau, the "Dean of American Rock Critics." Along the way, Rigby moved to Nashville, had her songs have been covered by rock legend Ronnie Spector, They Might Be Giants/John Flansburgh, Laura Cantrell, Jonell Mosser and Maria Doyle Kennedy, and drew comparisons to exalted songwriters like Elvis Costello and Richard Thompson. The Chicago Reader simply hails Rigby as an artist with "no peer on the current pop scene."
Her canny perspective on contemporary womanhood has also resonated beyond records and the live performance stage. She was the keynote speaker at the 1999 conference of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music, organized and moderated a "Rock Parenting 101" panel for the South By Southwest Music & Media Conference, and has spoken and performed at such diverse events as the Southern Festival of Books and the 2000 Rockrgrl convention in Seattle.
Now with Little Fugitive, Rigby tops herself again. Its title comes from the groundbreaking 1953 independent film by Morris Engel and Ruth Orkin, and reflects her view of herself, at age 46, as a traveling troubadour performing across North America and Europe. It also finds Rigby at a fulcrum in her personal and artistic development, considering both where she has been and where she is now headed. This juncture of past and future is indicated on the album by the presence of such back-up singers as her former band mates in The Shams and her 16-year-old daughter Hazel, a budding musical talent in her own right.
As the album closes with "The Things You Leave Behind" - the first cover song Rigby has recorded, written by Patti Smith consort Lenny Kaye - one can sense Rigby's creativity pondering new challenges beyond the series of peaks on her five solo albums. It takes but a listen to Little Fugitive to hear that it's the work of a masterful and original musical artist in full bloom.
