E-Mail This Article to a Friend
	ASHLEE SIMPSON SINCERELY YOURS

Confronted with a captive teenage audience, many performers suddenly become politicians. The Berklee-bred quintet the Click 5 are apparently being groomed as the Backstreet Boys of power pop (they even cover Tiffany’s cover of the Tommy James & the Shondells’ "I Think We’re Alone Now"), and their opening set for Ashlee Simpson Friday at the Orpheum was built on assurances they’re unlikely to keep. "Who here has ever had a broken heart?" asked frontman Eric Dill. The teenage-and-younger audience screamed. "Not one of us on this stage," he continued, "not Ben or Ethan or Joey or Joe or me, Eric — would ever break your heart." These five dashing young men in matching suits may have sounded like the La’s and goofed like the Monkees, but their awkward pandering made one cringe.

Then there are the special few, like Ashlee, to whom artifice comes naturally. She could’ve told the boys that pop never promises not to break your heart: it merely commiserates and pretends to love you back. If there’s an audience that’s likely to sympathize with the plight of a girl who gets caught cheating and suffers the over-reaction of self-righteous adults, it’s the one that turned out at the Orpheum: 10-year-old girls in homemade T-shirts chaperoned by dads in ball caps, preppy junior-high tarts flashing bra straps and toting lip-ringed boyfriends. "I’ve had a rough year," Ashlee told them. "I couldn’t have made it without you." Then she played her signature song, "Shadow," the nastiest song about big sisters since Juliana Hatfield’s "My Sister." (Juliana, of course, didn’t have a sister, let alone one who thinks you find Chicken of the Sea in the poultry aisle.)

Ashlee’s quick-paced, four-costume-change set neatly sketched the outlines of her appeal to young girls: a video screen played clips of the girl who grew up "in the shadow of someone else’s dream" while the songs traced her fairy-tale arc from back-up dancer to leading woman. Keyboardist Lucy Walsh took the high notes on the sex-in-the-kitchen single "La La," but Ashlee’s voice, if hoarse, was far from terrible — better than that of Courtney Love (whose "Celebrity Skin" merited a brief vamp) on an average night. Viewers of The Ashlee Simpson Show are familiar with pictures of her swollen vocal cords, but if Ashlee was leaning on a recorded vocal track, I couldn’t hear it over the live assistance she got from a few thousand screaming fans. To them, her sincerity trumps others’ authenticity every time.