Amy Rigby

No way was Amy Rigby gonna top her 1996 solo debut, Diary of a Mod Housewife.
Autobiographical heartbreak fueling Nashville-style songcraft and alternative-school
vocals, Mod Housewife was a de facto concept album that held in suspension all the
emotions that surge around a dying marriage: With painful specificity, it was irritable,
tender, sarcastic, bereft, confused, regretful, fed-up, defiant, hopeful and horn... More >

What's most original about Rigby isn't her analysis of the men who fail to provide the kind of love she demands so sanely and evokes so hotly. Nor is it her designated theme, age, although I wonder how many 23-year-olds will learn as much about fun from "The Summer of My Wasted Youth" as she wants them to. It's class, which she's old enough to understand for the simple reason that she doesn't have enough money--not the way the executive mom who covets a bigger co-op doesn't have enough money, the way the temp mom who buys back-to-school outfits at Goodwill doesn't have enough money. Her voice as real as Roxanne Shanté's, Rigby sings in a material world. So Trisha Yearwood, I'm begging: cover "All I Want" if not "What I Need." (Grade: A-)