Rock, after 30

Amy Rigby kicks Hootie's ass -- hard

by Stephanie Zacharek

When you've reached your 30s and haven't tired of rock and roll -- or if you feel you need it more than ever -- the only thing more alienating than being surrounded by peers who haven't bought an album since Punch the Clock is being surrounded by the slop the music industry has so carefully formulated for them. Blues Traveler, Hootie and the Blowfish, Joan Osborne: it's all music calculated to rock your world, but not too hard, music that lets you fool yourself into thinking you're plugged in even if you long ago checked out.

Granted, it's hard for people to be plugged in when they're exhausted from caring for their children, from working at least one job, from worrying about their massive debts. But it's frustrating to hear so many over-30s claim that rock and roll just doesn't speak to them anymore, that they much prefer folk or country singers -- preferably the ones who make occasional references to cranky toddlers and diaper changes. Those singers, they feel, reflect the reality of their lives. Yet the toddlers and the diapers in those songs are as much a gimmick as the long-legged babes in a dumb Van Halen video are, calculated to appeal to them on the basis of their total exhaustion, as well as their conviction that it's time to put away "childish" things.

Too bad those lost rockers won't find their way to Amy Rigby's Diary of a Mod Housewife (Koch), one of the smartest, most affecting records of the year. Rigby, formerly of the Shams, writes songs that are half-country, half-pop, and completely in love with rock and roll. Diary layers buttery acoustic guitar sounds with rasping electric ones, as if declaring an uneasy truce between the reflectiveness of the singer-songwriter tradition and the passion of rock and roll. Rigby seems as comfortable with the legacy of girl-group pop as she is with that of Hank Williams; her songs might feature backing vocals that shimmer like a tinsel curtain, or honky-tonk rhythms that reshape themselves into something gentler with the addition of sweet, rueful pedal-steel lines.

But even on her ballads, Rigby -- whose voice has both tensile strength and an apricot tartness -- never goes soft: when you're writing about life as a grown-up, you can't afford to. She sings about "good girls" who work hard and spend their money fast, about couples who adore each other and fray each other's nerves, about scraping up the nerve to accept as a lover someone you've been holding at arm's length -- even as you're driving to his house, hardly able to wait until you get there. She doesn't buy into the idea that complicated lives demand calming music; she acknowledges that conflict, confusion, and hard-earned delight are all part of being an adult, and she revels in them.

On "Beer and Kisses," she captures the way the borders between the mundane and the sublime often smudge together in our lives. She explains how the couple in the song first found their domestic bliss and then uses the same lyric -- "Get home from work, turn on the light, sit on the couch, spend the whole night there" -- to chart how their early happiness transmuted from a sweet kind of comfort into angry boredom and back again.

In "Knapsack," Rigby gets at the weird way crushes keep us going when our lives are at their blandest. She can't summon the nerve to talk to the cute boy who works in a bookstore she frequents, but even if he's destined to play a bit part in her life, she isn't about to brush off what he means to her: "Crossed another novel off of my reading list, wish to be kissed, isn't that what lips are for?" During her last visit to the store -- she's got a job in another part of town and won't be able to see her crush anymore -- she says, "He smiled right at me, but I couldn't meet his eye . . ./I'll think about him when I go to bed at night/Deep in my sleep, isn't that what dreams are for?"

And she does sing about diaper pails, once -- but she's not waving the soiled nappy as a sympathy bid. Diary of a Mod Housewife isn't about feeling sorry for yourself because life is tough; it's about using whatever energy you have left, after getting through all of life's bullshit, to seek your own thrill. In her liner notes for the album, she explains who the mod housewife is: "Stuck in the netherworld between bohemia and suburbia . . . pushing a toddler in a swing, with a fading ink stamp on her hand from some club the night before." But you don't have to be a housewife, a mod, a mother, or a woman to connect with Diary of a Mod Housewife. If you've ever come home from work dog-tired and frustrated and immediately put on the loudest, rockingest thing you could lay your hands on, this album may sound like something you could have written yourself.