One song on the new album sure to get people’s attention is “Balls”. Over a raucous, garage-rock guitar riff, Rigby confronts an ex-lover, “You’ve got a lot of nerve to be calling here, but I love your nerve/You’ve got a lot of balls, you don’t even care about me at all/You’ve got a lot of balls, you don’t even care/Wish I could grow a pair.”
“Believe it or not”, she explains, “I was trying to write a Kim Richey song, because I think she writes such classy songs. I was still on track when I got to the chorus and said, ‘You’ve got a lot of nerve,’ but then I wanted to say, ‘You’ve got a lot of balls.’ I wondered, ‘Can I say that?’ But that wasn’t enough. Then I came up with that line, ‘Wish I could grow a pair.’ It really made me laugh, like I couldn’t believe what was coming out of my mouth. But it was totally what the song felt like — like I was such a wimp for putting up with such behavior.
“I like it when a song takes a totally unexpected turn like that. That’s what motivates me to finish a song. If I felt I knew what was going to happen when I started a song, I would be too bored to finish it. There’s a thing here in Nashville of picking a title and writing to that, but I could never do that. A lot of times when I’m writing, I imagine I’m making a movie. Am I going to cut away and go to another scene? Or am I going to move in for a close-up?
“The first time I played that song in public was at this in-the-round show with Jane Siberry and Jess Klein sponsored by WXPN in Philadelphia. People laughed out loud. I wouldn’t have felt right if it was just a cheap punchline laugh, but people also responded to the second verse, where I sing, ‘I’ve been seeing a couple men, but they’re like me so I don’t want them/They have feelings, they have morals, conscience and a soul.’ That made me feel good.
“The host said, ‘I love that song, but I could never play it on the radio.’ Sure enough, it was suggested that I take it off the album, which is ridiculous given what’s out there today.”
Rigby grew up as Amy McMahon in suburban Pittsburgh. She skipped her senior year of high school to study drawing and painting at Parsons in New York. Her first Manhattan boyfriend was a music fanatic who dragged her down to CBGB’s in 1976-77 to see the Ramones and Patti Smith. McMahon was fascinated by Smith’s uninhibited earthiness, and the teenage art student became a huge music fan. But she didn’t make music herself until 1983 when she returned to New York after a year in London.
“Punk had died down”, Rigby recalls, “and there wasn’t a lot happening except rap and Michael Jackson, so we started listening to country music. My roommate was a guy from Georgia, and he had a Patsy Cline record and an anthology called The Women Of Country Music, and I played those records over and over. Another friend, Sue Garner, had tapes of the Blue Sky Boys and the Louvin Brothers, and we would get together with a couple of girls and just sing harmony.
“I was captivated by the simplicity and realness of the lyrics. You could pick up a guitar and just sing along with them. It had the same feeling as punk in that it was just regular people who did this. They were from a different time and place, but if you looked at pictures of them, they didn’t look like they were in this rarefied atmosphere like Led Zeppelin. It seemed like anyone could get up onstage and do this. So we did.”
This period was captured in “The Summer Of My Wasted Youth”, a song on Middlescence. Amy co-founded a country band, the Last Roundup, with her brother Michael McMahon, Garner, Amanda Uprichard, Garth Powell and Angela Jaeger. They played country classics and Amy’s first original songs at galleries, cafes, clubs and a weekly Folk City show hosted by Yo La Tengo’s Ira Kaplan.
“I realized that I didn’t have a real emotional connection with visual arts,” Rigby recalls. “Music was much more uplifting to me. I loved the whole camaraderie of playing music. Sitting at a drafting table all by myself, working on jobs for other people, didn’t feel very rewarding or very interesting. I loved hanging out with a bunch of friends and working on arrangements and planning a show. I fell in love with show business.”
