Amy Rigby – 18 Again: An Anthology

Whatever the medium — literature, film, music — it’s rare enough for an artist to forge a truly distinct, expansive voice, a personal style at once immediately recognizable and endlessly flexible. Rarer still, to discover this gift in one’s late 30s, a period viewed all too typically by our youth-obsessed culture as creatively stagnant and unremarkable.

Singer-songwriter Amy Rigby is certainly cognizant of the formidable odds against her mid-life artistic awakening. She closes the pissed-off paean to waning desirability “Invisible” with the cynical aside, “They say that middle age is really the beginning of life…I don’t know if I buy that.” Yet her often exceptional six-year stint on Koch, ably excerpted on 18 Again, has proven a bold refutation of such “realist” defeatism.

Her 1996 solo debut Diary Of A Mod Housewife is the much-admired breakthrough. Mining the downside of an eleven-year marriage, Rigby unearths the common though rarely voiced pains of a catch-as-catch-can everyday existence: temp jobs and unpaid bills, tiny apartments and marital discord, the youthful dreams of boho freedom surrendering to the mundane realities of adult responsibility.

Too often “confessional” songwriters succumb to the twin perils of self-indulgent emoting and cliched generalizations. Yet flush with newfound confidence and recently unpent skills, Rigby effortlessly skirts such concerns, nailing the specifics of a singular (though representative) existence while displaying a melodic sense worthy of golden age Marshall Crenshaw.

Following that urgent self-discovery, the sequels, Middlescence and The Sugar Tree, assay the less glamorous, though equally rewarding, tasks of clearing and exploring newly claimed artistic territory — the former peaking higher, the latter more sustaining.

In all, the three releases boast more than a dozen instant classics, songs as quirky, substantive and shimmering as their spunky creator. 18 Again unerringly samples the cream of her catalog: the Spector-inflected vocal funhouse “All I Want”, the crotch-rocking Stones knockoff “Balls”, the tellingly detailed scenes-from-a-marriage “Beer And Kisses”, the giddy sexual expectation of “Wait Til I Get You Home”, the bittersweet pang of anonymous infatuation “Knapsack”, the single mother’s dating lament “What I Need”. And so it goes.

Obviously it’s too soon for a best of, and 18 Again does bear a discernible whiff of contract fulfillment. Nonetheless, the package’s dazzling wall-to-wall songcraft may ultimately supplant the very real pleasures of Middlescence and Sugar Tree, though Mod Housewife remains near-essential. Supplemented by the lilting femme fatale live staple “Keep It To Yourself” and a lovely demo rendition of “Magicians”, who knows, maybe 18 Again will someday prove near-essential itself.