Though she hasn't performed much in clubs
and her first album was just released this week,
Patti Rothberg, a New York singer, guitarist
and songwriter, is already worried that she's
being stereotyped. One might guess that she
is concerned about being written off as a
subway musician, since she was discovered
busking in the Union Square station in
Manhattan and her first album entitled
"Between the 1 and the 9", after the subway
lines that run there. But actually she's been
pegged as the next Alanis Morissette. And
this upsets her.
"So now I've been labeled with this disease,
T.F.S., tortured female syndrome," Ms.
Rothberg said, speaking by telephone from a
tour stop in Boston. "People are lumping all
these female singers together in one category.
What's the novel thing about a woman
singing? Women have been singing for
centuries."
On her album, Ms. Rothberg, who is 23, strums
acoustic and electric songs about the
complexities of relationships and of feeling
lonely in a world full of people more alike than
they want to believe. In "This One's Mine," a
psychedelic funk-rocker with music more
reminiscent of Lenny Kravitz than Ms.
Morissette, Ms. Rothberg gets back at an
ex-boyfriend with a chorus that doubles as an
anthem of self sufficiency, "Everybody has
their day and this one's mine." Ms. Rothberg
said her influences range from Olvia
Newton-John to the Black Crowes, but she
also spend a chunk of the interview analyzing
the meanings of Sonic Youth and Bjork songs.
With public notoriety approaching, Ms.
Rothberg who has been writing songs since
she was 15, has been thinking a lot about her
music and her role as an artist. Before the
interview she wrote a small essay inspired by
the questions she had been asked recently by
record-company employees, concertgoers and
journalists. One sentence reads: "T.F.S. is a
very real reaction to real life with different
female (artists) finding unique ways of
describing it."
Ms. Rothberg explained: "if all these women
are writing songs about the same thing, then it
must be a symptom of something that's really
going on. But also, not all women are alike and
it's not just women who write about the issues
that I write about. I had this one interviewer,
and all she could talk about was me and
Alanis. She said: 'Well, Alanis is about the
same age as you. You both have long brown
hair.' I was like, 'So that means 2Pac and any
bald rapper are exactly the same person?'"
Another line reads: "A song to have meaning
must be personal to some degree, otherwise
it's purely speculation. These songs are also
about feeling estranged or just plain strange.
We all want to be different and make our mark
in some way but still be the same."