E-Mail This Article to a Friend Recipe for a record deal The creation of media pop monsters Ashlee Simpson and Ryan Cabrera BY SEAN RICHARDSON

MTV’s The Ashlee Simpson Show, a midsummer hit that’s now in reruns, was music-industry voyeurism at its most compelling. See Ashlee spar with her label over the direction of her future chart-topping debut, Autobiography (Geffen); see Ashlee write and record with some of the best in the biz; see Ashlee perform in front of thousands of adoring fans. The obvious point of the show was to transform its perky 19-year-old star from bit player on the WB’s 7th Heaven (and as a dancer in star sister Jessica’s stage show) to main attraction. But why settle for one nascent star, her father/manager, Joe, must have asked himself on the sidelines, when you can have two? Enter another client of Joe Simpson’s JT Entertainment, Ryan Cabrera, whose regular Ashlee appearances helped push his own debut, Take It All Away (Atlantic), into the Top 10.

As most pop fans know, Ashlee and Ryan’s relationship on the show was personal as well as professional. These days, they’re telling the press they’ve parted on good terms to focus on their careers. But the romance lives on in Ryan’s current hit video, "On the Way Down," in which Ashlee plays the bartender at a club where her 22-year-old beau is performing. The clip was shot before her much-publicized dye job: she looks fly as always in a vintage rock shirt and miniskirt, but her hair has yet to go from blond to black. Fellow Texas native Ryan has heartthrob written all over him, although his giant shock of blond hair has been known to invite ridicule. The video is beyond cute: she gives him a piggyback ride, he gives her a guitar lesson, and the whole thing ends with their kissing in the club after it shuts down.

Ashlee doesn’t include Ryan in the video for her current smash, "Pieces of Me," but she makes up for it in the Autobiography liner notes: "Ryan, I love you! You are the most talented musician that I have ever met. You are my inspiration for ‘Pieces’!" She sounds just as smitten on the song itself: "Fall, with you I fall so fast/I can hardly catch my breath/I hope it lasts." Her voice is husky and bold; the track is an agreeable pop anthem with enough loud guitars to make the cut on an Avril Lavigne album. It’s destined to live on as a snapshot of both the Ashlee phenomenon and the puppy-love affair that went along with it.

It doesn’t take Ashlee more than a few paragraphs into her current bio to say the magic word: "It’s a rock record, with a cool edge to it." Give her this much: as home to Blink-182 and New Found Glory, Geffen is one of the world’s premier corporate-punk labels, and Autobiography executive producer Jordan Schur made his name building ye olde Limp Bizkit empire. But "Pieces of Me" is as pop as it gets: Ashlee wrote and recorded it with John Shanks and Kara DioGuardi, the same team behind Hilary Duff’s "Come Clean." So don’t expect Ashlee — or her role model, Avril — to join Linkin Park and Three Days Grace on rock playlists anytime soon. They might have been able to pass as rockers in 1984, but not in 2004.

Still, the odds are good on adventurous rock fans’ getting a kick out of Autobiography. On the title track, Ashlee’s melodies and attitude are descended from those of fallen grunge queen Courtney Love. "I’m a sexy girl in this crazy world," she shrieks, before hurling herself into a sleek chorus that Courtney herself might have had fun with, back in the day. With its playful rhymes and anxious bounce, "Lala" is even more fierce. "You make me wanna lala/In the kitchen, on the floor/I’ll be a French maid/When I meet you at the door," she wails, no doubt sending plenty of teen-pop parents to the skip button for the disc’s most unhinged performance.

But the album isn’t all doll parts and celebrity skin. The forthcoming second single, "Shadow," is even more middle-of-the-road than "Pieces of Me." It’s a tribute from Shanks and DioGuardi to their songwriting peer Linda Perry, the pen behind Christina Aguilera’s "Beautiful." Bland and derivative as it may be, "Shadow" nonetheless features some gutsy vocals from Ashlee. "Living in the shadow/Of someone else’s dream/Trying to find a hand to hold/But every touch felt cold to me," she sings, with a string section behind her for extra melodrama. "Someone else" is an obvious reference to Jessica, whose recent hit "With You" shares its girl-next-door charm with Autobiography. (When push comes to shove, the line in Ashlee’s bio that says "her album is not at all like Jessica’s" would be much more accurate if it were talking about her hair.)

Ashlee may have dedicated the album’s first single to Ryan, but he isn’t the only boy who shows up in her songs. In the first episode of her television show, she broke up with Josh Henderson, a flame who dated back to the days when they were both regulars on the WB. (He was in Popstars 2, a music program that ran on the network in 2001.) So along with all the love and lust, the disc has plenty of room for despair. "I just wanna talk to you/My broken heart just has no use/I guess promises are better left unsaid," Ashlee laments on "Love Makes the World Go Round," which makes clever use of the infectious opening melody from Jimmy Eat World’s "The Middle." On "Surrender," Shanks peels off more Courtney riffs and a frisky guitar solo over a pogo-friendly beat. "Baby, you can have it all/Now that you just let me go/Yeah, yeah," Ashlee snarls, her broken heart getting started on the road to recovery.

A pair of accomplished rock writers, Sugar Ray’s Stan Frazier and Goldfinger’s John Feldmann, show up on the second half of Autobiography. Frazier’s "Unreachable" is a dark ballad that has little in common with his own band’s sunny hits; Ashlee warns a possessive lover, "You can’t push a river, you can’t make me fall/But you can make me unreachable." Feldmann’s "Giving It All Away" is also a surprise: the track’s hardscrabble narrative may be a nod to his punk roots, but its chorus is downright elegant. Shanks reappears on the closer, "Undiscovered," a tender ballad that conjures the redemptive slow burn of U2’s "Bad." It’s another break-up song: "All the things left undiscovered/Leave me empty and left to wonder/I need you." By the time the cathartic coda comes around, Ashlee’s on her knees with a simple plea: "Don’t walk away." A thrilling ride on the emotional roller coaster of young adulthood, the album pulls off the impressive feat of transcending the wave of MTV hype it rode in on.

Ryan’s "On the Way Down" is a love song, but despite the flirty video, it’s not about Ashlee. Instead, in the spirit of the Simpson empire’s Christian roots, the track is a celebration of God’s grace. "On the way down I saw You/And You saved me from myself/And I won’t forget the way You loved me," is the lilting chorus, the capital letters in the lyric sheet making the singer’s intentions clear. As an acoustic strummer whose bio calls Dave Matthews his biggest influence, Ryan has no delusions of edginess. But the song is catchy as well as thoughtful, with an electronic sheen that makes it a worthy successor to last year’s top roots-pop jam, Jason Mraz’s "The Remedy."

Ryan’s arrangements may be indebted to Matthews, but the vocal cadences on "On the Way Down" bring to mind a different veteran hitmaker: the Goo Goo Dolls’ John Rzeznik. Since Take It All Away marks Rzeznik’s debut as a producer, that’s no coincidence. The collaboration is a fruitful one: the producer knows a thing or two about sprucing up organic tones for mass consumption, and teacher and student are both romantics at heart. Rzeznik’s rock past comes into play on "Illusions," the one track he helped write and on which he played guitar. "There’s more in this world than we see/Just leave these illusions behind and run with me," Ryan sings, melting hearts the way his mentor has been doing for years.

On Take It All Away, Ryan establishes himself as a talented writer who also happens to have a decent voice. The opening "Let’s Take Our Time" is a guitar-heavy ode to teen abstinence — "To hurry you would be a crime/Let’s take our time" — along the lines of Avril’s "Don’t Tell Me." On "Exit to Exit," he takes an aimless spin on the highway to deal with the pain of getting dumped. "Echo Park" tells a similar story over a mellower groove, but this time Ryan drives up a hill in downtown LA to cry his eyes out after his lover abandons him.

Like "On the Way Down," the title track gets spiritual: it’s a gentle, falsetto-laced ballad with an anti-materialist message. "Shame on Me" is the most ambitious production here and the highlight of the disc’s second half. "I’ve always paid attention to your point of view/But now I want to focus on the rest of you," Ryan smirks, driving the ladies wild with the song’s jazzed-up-funk backbeat and buoyant teen-pop melodies. Even though the romance between him and Ashlee seems over, Ryan remains a welcome addition to the Simpson empire.