Reality bites

Patty Giurleo's hard-won Long Time

Cellars by Starlight by Brett Milano

It's Friday night in the Middle East bakery, and Patty Giurleo is on stage with her acoustic band, playing for a small contingent of attentive fans and a much larger number of passers-through. If you weren't paying too much attention, what you'd hear is dark-shaded folk rock, with the singer's raspy vocal tones balanced by a pleasant lilt in her melodies. If you were listening closely, however, you'd catch some frank, unflinching observations about the kind of impulsive relationships that tend to develop in rock clubs after midnight. So if you happened to be on your way to doing something that Friday night at the Middle East that you might regret the following morning, the singer was already up there, regretting it for you.

It makes sense that Giurleo's idea of an uplifting, end-of-show cover tune is the Velvet Underground's beautifully obsessive "Pale Blue Eyes" -- which is how she closed out that night in the bakery. It was a similarly low-key and regretful song, "Sex Addict," that announced the arrival of a promising new songwriter talent to the Boston scene. At the time Giurleo was one of many troubled, idiosyncratic songwriters coming in through the door that Nirvana had kicked open, and the single received a highly favorable review in Spin magazine. Giurleo's debut CD, Long Time, appears this month (on the Cambridge-based 449 label), and though it doesn't include the single, it makes good on the promise of "Sex Addict." If you're in that frame of mind, it also makes Giurleo the perfect act to catch on Valentine's Day, when she plays at Toad. She'll also be back at the bakery on the 20th.

From the sound of things, Giurleo's been through a lot of hard living between releases. The confessional, singer-songwriter genre is her musical stomping ground, but it's the gritty details in her songs that make her more at home in rock than in folk circles. She's got an occasional vocal resemblance to Joni Mitchell, and a preference for the floating, not-quite-pretty kind of tunes that Mitchell wrote in her post-waif, pre-jazz period. But the album's stripped-down production goes against the soft-rock grain. Producer/engineer Dan McLaughlin hinges the album on her vocals and his piano and bass -- nothing really gets in the way of the lyrics, which detail a long trip through the love/sex wars.

The songs' heroine comes out more jaded, if not necessarily wiser. But what makes it work is the singer's unwillingness to let either herself or her partners off the hook. "Halfway House" is about a passing affair with an ex-convict in which the singer isn't kidding herself about whether or not the guy's worth the trouble. On "Belladonna" she calmly considers poisoning a cheating lover. And the poignant "The Dream Is Always the Same" explores the loneliness that makes her seek out such types.

The disc's final cut, "Whistles Went Off in My Mind," is the closest thing here to a pop song. With a little vocal sweetening care of a cameo by Buffalo Tom's Chris Colbourn, it's the kind of double-edged ending that the album calls for -- the singer's back on the prowl, her eye on a gentleman "snapping his fingers the way only a real slut would do . . . and whistles went off in my mind: is he half full or half empty?" By now our narrator's smart enough to recognize a loser, but she clearly intends to go along with him anyway.

It's never a good idea to assume that revealing songs are autobiographical. But when we meet at Redbones in Davis Square, Giurleo acknowledges that her life's actually been a bit messier than the album would suggest. Since she released the "Sex Addict" single four years ago, she reveals, she's acquired and kicked major drug and alcohol habits, which explains the long gap between releases. "If I hadn't been in recovery I wouldn't have written any of it, so it's a recovery CD by its very existence. People think that addiction has a side effect that gives you talent, and for a while I totally believed that -- I could have gotten high off that fuckin' rationalization for another 10 years easily. Right now I'm not buying any of it -- it's a built-in set-up. There have been a few that could do both, being addicted and being artists. But I know that Eric Clapton would still be a great guitarist if he'd never gotten high."

Like Clapton, Giurleo comes from a quiet, comfortable background: "I grew up in Bedford, and you can't get in trouble there if you try. I had no idea what the big, bad world was until I started falling off the edge." Even going to college at New York University, she never got to the demi-monde of Greenwich Village or CBGB's. In fact, her first taste of the rock world came on a trip back to Boston. She befriended Buffalo Tom manager Tom Johnston, and that gave her a front-row view of the alterna-rock/grunge explosion. At the time Johnston was also managing Come, and Giurleo joined them on the road when that band opened some dates for Nirvana. "I was a total wanna-be at the time. I didn't realize the work that went into a musical career. But I'd see these people and realize what I wanted to be -- not Courtney, because she always scared me. Really, the person I most wanted to be was [Come frontwoman] Thalia Zedek -- I still cringe when I hear my record and compare it to hers. It's funny, she probably doesn't know the first thing about me, but I feel like I really know her."

Eventually Giurleo wrote and recorded her first song, "Sex Addict," whose title was enough to raise a few eyebrows. "That was the idea. I'm not as bold as that anymore, but that was when PJ Harvey and Courtney were so big, and the ante was upped so high. You listen to that record and there's only two tracks on it -- guitar and vocal. It wasn't like I had a record in my pocket ready to be made. I didn't know what the fuck I had to say for myself. Getting reviewed in Spin was a fluke. I read it and said, 'God, I can't believe this is fuckin' happening in my life.' "

So there are a few reasons she didn't follow up with an album right away. "For one thing, I wrote a lot of shitty songs. I'd play open-mikes, and it would be a disaster. All these strong singers would be there, so why would they need to hear this depressed girl from New York?" For another, the aforementioned substance-abuse problems began taking their toll, though that was the experience that eventually provided the inspiration for Long Time.

"It's funny," she recalls, "there I was, a drug addict, and still I always managed to find guys who were bigger losers than I was -- pathological liars, guys on parole. I hope I've changed by now -- at least I'm not attracted to losers anymore. But I still meet the kind of people that you wouldn't believe were real if you'd read about them in a book. I still manage to find guys whose souls would have to be saved by me, but I've stopped trying to do that."

More of Giurleo's energy goes into music these days, though she gives herself surprisingly little credit for the album. "I wish I could say I had it all planned out, but I didn't go into the studio with anything to speak of. I had these little bare-bones folk songs and Dan came in with the bass and keyboard ideas. I still think that the real me would be something more like a Beth Orton or a Cat Power record. Now I want to do something entertaining, something that isn't just me talking about my problems. It's a pain in the ass to put yourself out there, but I wanted to have something finished, something I could hold up and say, 'Here, I fucking made this.' And now I do."

MORE REUNIONS

March will be a good month for Boston bands getting back together. As we announced last week, the 20th will find '60s heroes the Lost and the Remains reuniting at Paradise. And the following weekend has been penciled in for the annual anniversary show of WMBR's local-music show Pipeline, tentatively the 27th at Middle East. The event tends to feature surprise reunions, and three look to be confirmed for this year: the Titanics, Voodoo Dolls, and Busted Statues. Other names, including the Volcano Suns, are still being tossed around.

ALIZA'S BIRTHDAY

Local promoter, publicist, and band manager Aliza Shapiro turns 30 next Wednesday (the 10th), and she's throwing herself a relatively subdued rock-and-roll birthday party that night at T.T. the Bear's Place. She'll be featuring bands who tend to the moody and thoughtful side, and T.T.'s will be given cabaret-style seating for the night ("For added elegance and comfort -- plus, I'm getting old and I like to sit at shows," her e-mail points out.) Headlining will be the downcast, country-tinged Willard Grant Conspiracy, and the Cambridge pop duo Mishima will open. But this will also be a chance to catch two worthy bands that don't play that often. Hush Puppy is the latest project fronted by ex-Quivvver singer/guitarist Carol deFeciani, with more of a harmony-driven pop sound than her previous outfit. And the co-headliners are Magic 12, whose homonymous CD (on Dahlia) was one of last year's local sleepers. Subtle and seductive, the disc features torchy lead vocals by Dana Hollowell and acoustic piano by occasional Come member Beth Heinberg. Although it's full of hazy acoustic textures and late-night melancholia, there's also real songcraft involved. Highly recommended to anybody who always liked the idea of the Tindersticks or Red House Painters but wished that either band had something you could walk away humming.

COMING UP

The White Owls, a country/blues/jazz cover band including Dennis Brennan, begin a weekly Thursday-night residency at the Lizard Lounge tonight (Thursday) that will continue through February. The Peer Group are at the Linwood, Ricky Skaggs does his back-to-bluegrass show at the House of Blues, John Lincoln Wright is at the Plough & Stars, and the Red Telephone are at Lansdowne Street Music Hall. And it's a character-driven night at the Middle East with astrological crooner Harvey Sid Fisher and outer-space chanteuse Nancy Mrzocek . . . The Allstonians and Brass Monkeys are at T.T.'s on Friday, Cherry 2000 are at the Linwood, and the Major Stars (featuring the half of Magic Hour that wasn't in Galaxie 500) are at Jacques . . . The Big Bad Bollocks and Speed Devils are at the Middle East Saturday, Brooklyn dance band Euphonic play an unlikely double bill with the Figgs at T.T.'s, and the Cardigans are at the Roxy . . . Madder Rose and Kipper Tin do the pop at the Middle East Wednesday.