Alice Ripley Everything's Fine CD

This flawless collection of intimate and confessional songs is a complete stylistic departure from the Broadway songbook that has won actress Alice Ripley critical acclaim on stage and in original cast recordings. Ripley, along with producer Joel Moss, has created an album brimming with world rhythms, haunting melodies, and captivating lyrics that reveals new treasures upon repeated listenings. Expertly melding influences that encompass folk, country, pop, worldbeat, blues, and jazz, Ripley's songwriting displays a greater spiritual depth than a typical contemporary adult rock album. Though the tracks comprise a biographical song cycle based on Ripley's tumultuous upbringing, there is never a hint of self-indulgence or shoegazing. The sparse organic arrangements are supported with colorful performances by her studio band that encourage Ripley to soar with a romantic and fiery sophistication. Each track is a gem. Ripley often displays a flare for the dramatic, especially when the second cut, "Shine On," bursts into an irresistibly hooky chorus, or in the blue-eyed soulful dialogue she injects into the verses of the title cut's swamp-funk groove. With this striking solo debut, Alice Ripley proves she has the strength to shed her theatrical skin and embark a strictly musical career. ~ Tom Semioli

"I was born six years before we landed on the moon," writes Alice Ripley. "Seven weeks before the Beatles landed on the Ed Sullivan show, three weeks after John F. Kennedy was assassinated, and eleven days before Christmas." On her debut album, Everything's Fine, Alice again enters quietly into an America distracted by splashier events. In the stillness when no one else is looking, she writes the surprising poetry of the ordinary-in which shoes and steering wheels figure as largely as angels, and tragedy may be a sunny afternoon in suburbia."The Bradys rule," Alice sings-as well she should, since her own experience, growing up, was a Brady-esque cobbling together of families. After her parents divorced and her father remarried, she found herself the middle child of eleven. Alice has joked that she didn't get her very own underwear until she left for college. Much of her writing reflects the uneasiness born of having come of age in a crowd-both loved and overlooked, unique and faceless-yearning for recognition and identity.

The voice that tells us Everything's Fine is a particularly American one, shaped by a particularly American childhood. Like many children of divorce, Alice shuttled between households, and in her case between states-the demands of her father's business forced him to move often, and the book of her growing up had chapters in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Indiana. "The transient feeling of the songs-of my life-comes from going back and forth between my mother and my dad, and their moving." It isn't surprising that Alice's first record is characterized by restlessness-by railroad tracks, packing boxes, and yellow lines on the highway. In the lovely, aching "Drive," she makes escape her anthem: Guess I'll drive in my wheelin' blue angelOut of the city, into the desert, across the oceanGuess I'll cry so unexpectedlyUntil I'm dry and I can finally cease this constant motionAlice's search for a true sense of belonging is emblematic of modern childhood. She was continually the "new kid" at school; she had a sudden, unconventional family. Her fantasies were of one day getting to ride with her father in the front seat of his car, or hear her mother acknowledge their long-ago happiness with one story, one photograph. And though it wasn't, the adults insisted everything was fine. This sense of denial is a major theme of Alice's music. In the bitterly funny "Suburbia," she tackles the forced normalcy of a middle-class neighborhood where unpleasantness is swept under the carpet: The Stepford family lives right next doorThey don't allow black-soled shoes on their hardwood floorI've never seen them bleed, that's w