Essential New Music: Amy Rigby’s “Hang In There With Me”

From connection comes meaning, but also pain. This album’s title words “Hang in there with me” come from third track “O Anjali,” on which a catch-up phone call to a friend turns into a confrontation with some heavy news and a heavier heart. Acuity is one of Amy Rigby’s gifts, and it doesn’t desert her throughout Hang In There With Me, so each guitar and synth-swaddled line registers a telling detail or felt response. The rewards and travails of aging are at the top of her mind throughout her first album in five years, and that makes sense: Rigby turned 65 this year, and she’s had some personal experiences of loss and near-loss to compound the universal troubles she’s observed while living through recent times.

But that detail-oriented perspective also keeps her songs from turning into myopic wallows; the defiantly Tom Petty-ish “Hell-Oh Sixty” spends most of its time counting down the plusses and minuses of early decades. Mostly, she sounds glad to still be at it. Rigby may be “Too Old To Be So Crazy” and smart enough to know exactly why she shouldn’t be gearing up for another record and tour, but mostly she sounds really glad that she still can. Balance is another part of Rigby’s craft, so that gratitude keep the smiles coming. So does some precisely placed, hardnosed humor; on “Bricks,” she uses the language of home improvement to shore up defenses against a boundary challenge.

While Rigby is a great writer, she’s also conscious of music’s other necessities. Each lyric is hung upon a sturdy melody, which is in turn draped in vivid, ever-changing, psychedelically informed arrangements. Whether it’s Yo La Tengo-meets-Rolling Stones rave-up “Heart Is A Muscle” or the unfurling, mostly acoustic “The Farewell Tour,” Rigby and her husband/recorder/co-musician Wreckless Eric give each tune a setting that jumps out of the speakers and draws you into the tales she tells. [Tapete]

—Bill Meyer