Looking for trouble Ambrosia Parsley and Shivaree get political BY TED DROZDOWSKI

Shivaree’s first local date was some six years ago at Toad. That night, they looked like a Gypsy camp on stage. The band spilled onto the small Cambridge club’s benches and front tables, a sprawl of rag-tag New York City bohemians and their percussion and stringed instruments and keyboards and foot pedals taking up more than a quarter of the Porter Square room. Singer Ambrosia Parsley stood on the floor in front of her crew. She smiled and twisted her hands as if she were a wizard casting little spells to shape her low, warm, clear vocal tones into hypnotic trapezoids and elaborate knots as curvy and circular as the stories that would make up Shivaree’s debut album, I Oughta Give You a Shot in the Head for Making Me Live in This Dump (Capitol), in 1999. It was a memorable, playful evening of music that could be described as fairy-tale rock, full of beauty and humor and weirdness and a sly, subtle sense of sonic rebellion.

Shivaree made a few return trips to Boston last fall, on the heels of their signing to Cambridge-based Rounder Records’ Zoë imprint and the release of a five-song EP called Breach. But it’s taken five long years for Parsley and her core cohort of guitarist Duke McVinnie and keyboardist Danny McGough to release the full-length US follow-up to their Joe Henry–produced debut. They were, as you could have predicted, dealt a few cold hands by the music biz. The most chilling was being dropped by major-label Capitol, an act that prevented their second album from being issued in the States.

Now Shivaree are back from the battlefront of the industry and in the thick of America’s current cultural war with their new Who’s Got Trouble?, which comes out this Tuesday. Yet as much as George Bush’s blindered vision of the nation’s destiny gnaws at the craw of Parsley and her pals, they haven’t lost their humor, their sweetness, or their deliciously subversive sound. And her singing is better than ever. Imagine a girlish Billie Holiday with fewer dark clouds hovering above her squared shoulders. Parsley’s voice — even in the sad secular prayer "Lost in a Dream" — has the aural caress, breathy undertone, and elasticity of the sounds that ride the warm air flowing from gently blown saxes, trumpets, and clarinets. And tunes like "I Close My Eyes," which is part spaghetti western and part conspiracy, have the same hooky charm that made the skewed mambo "Goodnight Moon" the album’s first single after I Oughta Give You a Shot in the Head for Making Me Live in This Dump was released. You probably don’t remember that tune. After all, five years is 35 in dog years and at least 70 in the realm of radio and popular music. Reflecting on that, even Parsley is a bit stunned.

"After our first album, we wrote our second — the one that didn’t come out in America — and then fell out with the record company, so we started writing the songs for Who’s Got Trouble? immediately," she explains over the phone from her New York home. "Since the music industry is such a sinking ship, it was really easy not to take being dropped personally, but we didn’t want it to get in the way of the music, so we immediately kept on task. But that whole process took five years. We realize now that, ‘Whoa, that’s a drag. People in America haven’t heard from us in five years, so now we’ve got to start all over here.’

"The nice thing about being on Zoë is they were like, ‘Go make your record. You don’t have to play it for us unless you want to.’ That was so much fun, with nobody freaking out wanting to remix everything or screaming the word ‘single.’ "

Parsley thinks of her singing as constantly evolving. "I’ve always had a really low voice, and what makes it fun for me is to find different ways to make myself hit the high notes and to find out what kind of different noises I can make. Some things stick and others fall by the wayside, and somehow I ended up developing my own style of singing from that."

Shivaree’s music is much the same, sprung from a warm, quiet center but with a sense of constant, playful experimentation that often leads the group headlong into textural music. But their approach to sonic layering sacrifices nothing, from the natural warmth of Parsley’s singing to unadorned tones of acoustic instruments to the weirdness of effects and samples. Everything on their albums and in their concerts percolates comfortably together, always giving Parsley plenty of room to negotiate her melodic S-curves even as she’s stalked by creepy carnival Farfisa and chimes ring and guitars transmit Sputnik signals. No wonder they pull off a graceful version of ambient-music granddaddy Brian Eno’s spy story "The Fat Lady of Limbourg" on both Breach and Who’s Got Trouble? And they recorded the song, like the smarties they are, in one take. Nonetheless, there’s a good chance it’ll sound different the next time they pull into town.

"A CD is like an album of snapshots," Parsley says. "Those pictures never change. But when we play live, we like to move things around and make the songs different so they can breathe and live. It’s interesting to see how they grow, and it keeps things fresh. By shifting things and adding new sounds, we keep our music from going flat for us. A song can’t be flat. That’s like a joke with no punch line or a story without emotions. Keeping the feelings in our songs alive is important, because if they’re not funny or sad or angry, they’re nothing. You’ve got to keep the door wide open for meaning and creativity or you’ll miss something good."

Parsley says Shivaree decided to cover "The Fat Lady of Limbourg" for its mix of intrigue and "a feeling of conspicuous consumption, which I felt really was appropriate for the times." In other songs, images of emptiness, control, concealment, loss, and manipulation appear. What inspired them is as transparent as the Bush administration’s capitalist brown-shirt agenda. In a year when even Tom Waits and other historically apolitical songwriters have tuned their lyrics to the political climate, why not Shivaree? Which means, at least from the perspective of Parsley, McVinnie, and McGough, the answer to Who’s Got Trouble? is "everybody." "The world is in an uproar and it’s hard to ignore," Parsley says. "It’s something I never thought would be the first thing on my mind every day, but it is — especially living in New York City, where everybody is pretty fired up 24/7.

"After the election, I found myself exhausted from being angry 24 hours a day. I really thought that if Kerry had inherited this mess, he’d be blamed and out in four years, and we’d have 12 more years of Republicans. This way, it seems like the Republicans will have to take responsibility for what they’ve done, although some mind-blowing things have happened and nobody in any position of authority seems to mind. It’s so heart-breaking and maddening."

Even away from Shivaree, Parsley has focused on world events. Each Friday since April, she’s been featured in a segment called "Ambrosia Sings the News" on the Air America radio network’s Al Franken Show, rendering a cappella renditions of breaking stories. "I never thought I would do anything like this, but it keeps me writing every Thursday to get ready, and it’s really unusual and challenging. Given the way I’m feeling about things in the world, it’s probably good for me too."

Maybe it’s something like paid therapy, even if it keeps her in the thick of troubles.