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Friday, October 11, 2002

By Scott Mervis, Post-Gazette Weekend Editor

Kim Richey has a fresh rental car, a tank of gas and nowhere to go.

	Kim Richey: "I never really fit in any kind of genre, so I don’t feel obligated to start now.”

The appointment that she and her manager got the car for was canceled, so now they have some free time. And they’re thinking about heading toward Venice Beach.

“Did you see ‘Dogtown and Z-Boys’?,” she asks excitedly, referring to the movie about the cool Los Angeles skateboard gang that broke all the rules in the ’70s. “I just loooove that movie, so we have to go there. If I find anything groovy, I’ll report back to you.”

A pilgrimage to a skateboard capital of the world is more suited to a band on the Warped Tour than a nice singer-songwriter like Richey. But she has shown a capacity for unpredictability.

When she first sat down with producer Bill Bottrell to make “Rise,” he asked her what genre she saw this record fitting into.

“I never really fit in any kind of genre,” she told him, “so I don’t feel obligated to start now.”

		Music Preview KIM RICHEY WHERE: Club Cafe, South Side. WHEN: 7:30 p.m. today and Saturday. TICKETS: $15. 412-323-1919.

Richey first hit the music scene in the mid-’90s as an alt-country Nashville darling with a sweet voice and a way with words. Not bad for a girl from Dayton. Actually, she was living in Washington state when a friend sent her a tape of Steve Earle’s first record.

“It just knocked me out,” she says. “The stories, the way he sang, it wasn’t pretty singing, but you just believed everything he said. I thought, if that’s what’s going on down there…”

What she found when she pulled into Nashville in the late ’80s was a scene that wasn’t quite as inspired as “Guitar Town” led her to believe.“

"Steve Earle says that [record] was the ‘great credibility scare of the ’80s,’ ” Richey says. “I got suckered into that and it was like, ‘Psych, that’s not what we’re doing.’ ”

Richey made two records with all the right Nashville studio session players and drew comparisons to Shawn Colvin, k.d. lang and Lucinda Williams. Predictably, her two

hits were scored by others: Radney Foster with “Nobody Wins” and Trisha Yearwood with the Grammy-nominated “Believe Me Baby (I Lied).”

For her third record, “Glimmer,” Richey abandoned Nashville for New York, London and producer Hugh Padgham (XTC, Police), who took her in the ethereal pop-diva direction. Even the critics weren’t all that enthused.

Bouncing back, she made “Rise” a group effort, joining Bottrell (Sheryl Crow, Rusted Root) and his team for a writing-playing session at his Mendocino, Calif., studio.

“I didn’t plan on writing that many songs up there, because I had a ton of songs written,” she says. “When I got there, it seemed to be a good combo, the four of us. Writing like that can be hard because you have everybody saying random stuff, it can be like too many radios on. But the good thing was, I’m not so limited to my own rhythm guitar style.”

“Rise” is Richey’s biggest musical statement, from the lonesome, weary twang of “Girl In a Car” and the sumptuous “Without You” to the Farfisa-powered “Me and You” and the Middle Eastern swirl of the record’s single and standout track, “This Love.”

Having had hits with others, how driven is she to make it happen on her own?

“It’s not something I don’t want to happen,” Richey says. “But I’m not going to change what I do. I think that songs other than the stereotypical commercial songs can do well on radio. People just have to hear stuff a few times to be

familiar with it, and that means playing it more than once at 2 o’clock in the morning.”

Once she’s done looking for the Z-Boys, Richey will fly east and head for Pittsburgh, where she’s found a strong ally in WYEP.

“Awww, they’re good,” she says. “I can tell such a difference when I go into a town where it gets played on the radio.”

Scott Mervis can be reached at smervis@post-gazette.com or 412-263-2576.