Amy Rigby is all heart. Her songs, which find the magic in the everyday of parenthood, relationships, and the working musician’s life are full of warmth and wit. Rigby’s latest album, this year’s Hang In There With Me, deals with aging and is full of sweetness, which was fully apparent when she took the stage for a recent performance at Jammin’ Java.

A native of Pittsburgh, Amy and I are both children of the Rust Belt. I grew up just a couple of hours away, in Akron, Ohio, and visited Pittsburgh often to see my cousins. It’s a beautiful city, and I especially remember its bridges, as well as the T-Rex in the Natural History Museum. Amy was headed back there the next night, she said at Jammin’ Java on Oct. 17, which prefaced her singing “Playing Pittsburgh.”

In her excellent memoir, Girl To City, she talks about how, after high school, she moved to New York to attend art school at Parsons School of Design. Amy read a bit from the book about a Jewish boy from Long Island she met at school who may have had an unhealthy parasocial relationship with Lou Reed, then played the song she wrote about him, appropriately entitled “Bob.” This not to be confused with Bob Dylan, who is the subject of another song she played, “Dylan In Dubuque.” (It only took me two tries to spell Dubuque!)

In New York, Amy started making music with her friends in the bands the Last Roundup and the Shams, who she’s said were the only band to open for both the Indigo Girls and Urge Overkill. She also got heavily involved in the city’s punk scene at CBGB, which remains an ongoing influence on her sound. Oddly, sites like AllMusic have seen fit to classify her work as Americana, but I hear a lot more of the Ramones than any twang in her songs. This time in her life is what “Dancing With Joey Ramone” is all about.

While she’d been playing bands for years, Rigby really made a splash when she released her solo debut, Diary of A Mod Housewife, in 1996. The critically beloved album is available on vinyl and streaming now, after being hard to access for quite some time. (It was even pressed near my hometown, in Cleveland!) On Thursday night, she played the album’s lead track, “Time For Me To Come Down.”

Stream “Time for Me to Come Down” by Amy Rigby on YouTube:

Aging is a theme of Hang In There With Me, and with our own aging comes the aging our parents. In 2021, Amy and her husband, fellow musician Wreckless Eric, who backed her on bass and guitar, moved her father into assisted living. As one does, they were trying to set up his internet and phone service, and needed some help from technical support. Amy was, as she put it, strangely emotional, not having had much human contact, and that experience turned into a song, “O Anjali.” Last year, her dad passed away at the age of 96. She wrote “Don’t Play ‘Danny Boy,'” which she played solo, for his funeral.

Amy kicked things off with “Hell-Oh Sixty,” and she explored similar territory later with “Too Old To Be This Crazy.” Before that one, she noted, “I don’t think any of us take anything for granted after the last couple years.” She followed that with “Bricks,” after which she talked about her long history with Jammin’ Java. “I’ve been playing here since before there was GPS to find the venue. It was hard!” Her last visit to the venue, and to the DMV, was in October 2019 — five years ago! 

Of note, Rigby said she has finished her second book of memoir, entitled Girl To City. It picks up where the last one left off, after she put out her solo debut in 1996, when she’s moving to Nashville to pursue a publishing deal. The plan is for the book to come out next year, and I can’t wait to read it.

She also played “Bangs,” a witty tune about the “power” of her signature hairstyle. Recently, she and Eric moved back to his native England, but, for 12 years before that, they lived in upstate New York, where she worked at a combination bar and bookstore, where she often get the pulse of things from her younger coworkers. That’s where she got the title of “The Farewell Tour,” which was how one of them described how things are at the end of a relationship when you know you’re going to break up. The evening’s lone cover was, a bit surprisingly, “Visitors” by ABBA. Other songs included “Last Night’s Rainbow,” “Heart Is A Muscle,” and “All I Want.” She finished by having Eric come back out to play “Don’t Ever Change” with her.

While most people are really only familiar with the biggest-name acts, they’re not really representative of most musicians. Folks like Amy are much more common: passionate, dedicated working class artists who’ve done excellent work, but have never found mass popularity. So much of this work, like Amy’s, really is great and magical, and there’s a whole world to discover if you’re willing to look around. If you have a chance to see her on this tour, she’s not to be missed; now that she’s living in England, she may not be back for a while.

Here are some photos of Amy Rigby performing at Jammin’ Java on Oct. 17, 2024. All pictures copyright and courtesy of James Todd Miller.