Consumer Guide Album

Amy Rigby: A One Way Ticket to My Life [Southern Domestic, 2019]
Here be nineteen four-track demos recorded on a Tascan Portastudio between pre-Shams 1987 and post-Diary of a Mod Housewife 1997 and released in this form in 2019, with just one selection apiece from that pioneering female trio and Rigby's superb solo debut and follow-up albums. Their demo provenance isn't a positive--even the solid Nashville-style arrangements she favored pre-Wreckless Eric added more oomph than she generally manages here whether solo or with helpers. But Rigby has been one of our finest songwriters for a quarter century, and the only reason this material stayed in that Portastudio so long is that she couldn't figure out where else to put it. So though the three tracks preceding the "Tomorrow's All We Got" closer could use some of that oomph, the quality here is impressively consistent, with two songs it would have been hard to slip onto her early albums altogether remarkable: "Mrs. Gordon Ray Thomas," in which an imprisoned armed robber explains why her crime spree made her "a happy woman," and "Contractor," in which asbestos breaks up a marriage none too soon. B+