Patti Scialfa: 23rd Street Lullaby : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Patti Scialfa's 1993 debut, Rumble Doll, defied listeners' expectations so outrageously that it ended up being unjustly ignored. On that record, far from coming on like Mrs. Bruce, Scialfa sounded like Ronnie Spector performing songs written by Sylvia Plath. Among other subjects, Scialfa struggled with her role as the tabloid-lashed other woman in Springsteen's first marriage, torn between the urgency of her love and the hard reality of "that ring around your finger."

Those tough choices are deep in the past on 23rd Street Lullaby, a sweeter, more confident effort. Scialfa is again examining her past, but now from the vantage of a woman who has gotten much of what she wanted and wonders if all of life's intensity is behind her. To answer those questions, she revisits Manhattan's Chelsea neighborhood, where, just out of college, she got her start as a singer-songwriter. "Now there's a river of faces," she sings. "In the tide of rise and fall/Do they wonder where we've gone?/Do they think of us at all?" The song's title, "You Can't Go Back," provides the unsentimental answer.

With co-producer Steve Jordan (Keith Richards, Jon Spencer), Scialfa assembles a smart group of players, including guitarists Nils Lofgren and Marc Ribot, cellist Jane Scarpantoni and violinist-singer Soozie Tyrell, with Jordan on drums and Springsteen "here and there." The result is sophisticated pop that frames Scialfa as a jaunty, East Coast version of Rickie Lee Jones or Bonnie Raitt. In its cleareyed joyfulness and unpretentious appeal, 23rd Street Lullaby evokes a woman not haunted by her past but enriched by it. "And a light fell from heaven with a promise/That all lost things are someday found," she sings in "State of Grace." Even in a world where nothing comes without a price, it's possible to get everything you paid for, and more.