Amy Rigby – Til The Wheels Fall Off

Philip Larkin wrote that in all people there sleeps a sense of how their lives might have been different, had they been loved. “Nothing changes that,” he concluded. Amy Rigby’s fourth album alternates between awakening that sense and trying to bury it.

Like her previous work, Til The Wheels Fall Off frames Rigby’s scuffles with existence, romance and endurance in a sturdy pop-rock format. She wears this unconventionally and well, not despite but precisely because of the cracks experience inflicts upon her pretty, wavering voice. Against the attitudinally challenged post-pubescents and creatively challenged oldsters normally drawn to the style, Rigby contrasts brightly.

And while she can develop lyrical twists worthy of Elvis Costello and hooks that could plausibly claim Brill Building origins, Rigby hits her stride when she treats those qualities as useful quirks, then focuses on the basics. Snappy surf-band organ never slows the breezy pace Rigby and Todd Snider set for the title track; kitsch background — harpsichord, campy retro tempo, other thefts from the Burt Bacharach playbook — merely dresses up the tentative hopes and wishes of “The Deal”; vibes and swelling strings leave room for the deluge of tenderness in “How People Are”.

The instrumental touches conform to Rigby’s varied moods: confused (“Shopping Around”), sympathetic (“Even The Weak Survive”), yearning (“Don’t Ever Change”). By the time she achieves happiness with the airy “All The Way To Heaven”, Rigby has compressed the facets of these songs into a single, gem-luminous sense of how different life is when one actually is, and feels, beloved.