Shivaree

It’s become something of a weekly ritual for Ambrosia Parsley, she’s pleased to report. Every Thursday in her native New York, art-pop trio Shivaree’s dusky diva heads down to her favorite restaurant, Cafe Havana, with a stack of daily newspapers tucked under her arm. The routine is the same. “I sit down, order a bloody mary and huevos rancheros,” explains the 33-year-old, over an afternoon margarita at her Bay Area hotel. “Then I go through the papers, rhyme it up, go sing it, and they play it on Friday” on the new Air America Radio network, in a wacky regular segment dubbed “Ambrosia Sings The News.” “I do that every Thursday, and that’s how I’ve got health insurance,” she chuckles, grabbing a handful of bar snacks from a bowl on her table. “We love health insurance. And this spicy peanut mix—those are the only two things in life you need.”

And, perhaps, a decent record deal. Which Shivaree finally nabbed with the Zoë imprint after watching its spooky ’02 sophomore set, Rough Dreams, get dropped from the Capitol release schedule. What’s worse, Parsley sighs, a Capitol accountant called to tell her the bad news, on the eve of what should’ve been a triumphant 25-date European tour. “Which explains the really long period where nobody saw us,” she adds. “We just said ‘Bye-bye record let’s go make another one’.” Which she did, with the gorgeous, neo-vaudevillian Who’s Got Trouble? and its flagship, more politically-minded EP Breach. Parsley’s voice is still cabaret-smoky, almost Brecht/Weill-voluptuous, and her bandmates Duke McVinne (guitar) and Danny McGough (keyboards) conjure up suitably lush soundscapes for her to traverse (including a Gothic cover of Eno’s “The Fat Lady Of Limbourg”).

But it hasn’t all been sour grapes, Parsley points out. Filmmaker Quentin Tarantino was so taken with early Shivaree track “Goodnight Moon,” he included it in the closing credits of Kill Bill, Vol. 2. And impresario Hal Willner recently cast her voice in his Brooklyn-staged Neil Young Project. But how does this harmonic Huntley/Brinkley decide which news tidbits are trillable? It’s not easy, Parsley shrugs. “Because the world is an incredibly damaged place right now. And Shivaree actually wrote a song a few years ago that never got finished, the story of that Florida woman whose fantasy was to have her house broken into and to then be murdered in her house. So she met this guy online, she sent him a plane ticket, said ‘Some time between this day and this day, break in and kill me.’ And he did.” With her Air America show, she’s quickly learned, “that’s the trick—knowing what to cover. Because some things — like that story — just aren’t funny when you sing ’em.”