Considering she's never actually met the guy, David Duchovny has been good to Bree Sharp. Or more specifically, "David Duchovny," the giddy paean she wrote for the X Files star when just out of college, has been extremely good to the twenty-three-year-old singer/songwriter.| By now the story of the song is pretty well known: how it found its way into the X Files camp and became a cult hit when the show's staff shot an unofficial video with celebs like Brad Pitt and Whoopie Goldberg lip-synching lines like, "David Duchovny / Why won't you love me / I'm cute and I'm cuddly / I'm gonna kill Scully!" A record contract all but fell in her lap, and the aspiring actress and recent college grad was off and running in the music biz.

It's the perfect story -- and the perfect song -- to kick start a music career. In the post-Lilith Fair world, however, one out-of-the-box hit does not guarantee accolades or signify artistic depth; life's a bitch that way, to paraphrase Meredith Brooks. But given that the insanely infectious "Duchovny" is one of the least remarkable tracks on Sharp's consistently striking Trauma Records debut, Cheap and Evil Girl, consider her an exception to the rule. Still, she's not about to knock the track that put her on the pop culture radar. "It was totally truthful for the time," she says of "Duchovny," explaining her inspiration for the umpteenth time with not a trace of weariness. "But I did not have any idea the response that I would get from it, and ... what a thrill."

Within five minutes of meeting Sharp, one's not at all surprised that she could wring such a memorable song from a TV crush. Maybe she's had way too much caffeine today, but in person, she boils over with excitability, leaning forward and pinning you to your chair with her wide eyes as she passionately expounds on this thought or that. "You know what I mean?" she'll ask at the end of a point, and, like a rabbit in headlights, you just sort of nod dumbly. She does this while recounting her favorite Lilith Fair story (trying not to spazz while singing a verse of Dylan's "I Shall Be Released" during the all-star jam), and while trying to explain some of her favorite songs, like Elvis Costello's disturbing "I Want You" ("It's sick in the head, but you know what it's like, when you want someone sooo bad, and you know the way they smell, the way they taste... "). It'd all be a little too intense for comfort if she didn't fire off a shotgun, Nanny-style giggle every now and then.

All of this -- the giddiness, the hot-under-the-collar passion and the random blasts of mischief -- shines through on Sharp's debut, which finds her nimbly hopping from wry humor ("Duchovny" and the new single, "America") to genuinely personal ache ("Smitten" and the stunning "Walk Away," the first song she ever wrote) to pseudo-hedonistic fantasy (the title track and "Faster, Faster"). Think of it as a cuddly, vulnerable kitten packing nine-inch claws and a split personality.

"I wasn't a rebellious type, but there are definitely pieces of 'Cheap & Evil Girl' that are in me somewhere," Sharp says. "Not usually during the daylight hours, but she'll come out once and a while. Of course there's certain things I'd never do, like murder anyone or steal someone's wallet or drink whiskey in the morning. But I do get to play rock star now, which is really fun. I get to dress up in fun clothes and put on a show, and performing is just what I've always been happy to do."

Sharp has had the bug since she first sang on stage at five, but spent most of her life pursuing acting rather than music (she studied in David Mamet's New York theater company). She wrote "Walk Away" "totally for myself" while in college, in an attempt to come to grips with the end of a relationship. But she never imagined herself performing her own songs in public until she was coaxed into it by friends and a professional musician who heard her sing during a production of Twelfth Night. "At first I was like, A: I'm not a singer, and B: I'm totally not interested," she says. "But I decided to work with him a bit, and I totally got bitten. I made some demos, and I got immediate response from record companies. I was really fortunate. I decided that every thing in my life was pointing me towards music. And who was I to go against the grain?"

Given her use of the term "play rock star" instead of "be a rock star," one assumes Sharp is still in acting mode. Not so. To begin with, her "acting muscles are out of shape" (it's complicated, she laughs). But more to the point, there's a fundamental difference between the two art forms which keeps them separate, even when she's on stage vamping through lines like "Faster, faster, I'm a trashy motorcycle beauty."

"The difference is, [music]'s much more about you," she explains. "Acting is a very dependent art form; somebody else wrote it, somebody else directs it, it's somebody else's scene, somebody else's life. And with music, it's pretty much me. Even if it's just a fantasy, it's still my fantasy."

RICHARD SKANSE
(October 4, 1999)