If we're lucky, we get that when we're single: a period in the midst of bad boyfriends, of not knowing whether it all ends up OK, of anxiety about money and friends and identity, when suddenly we're at peace and can feel ourselves propelled forward. It's when all the self-absorption becomes the fuel on which we ride our careers and independence as far as they go before they get stalled by families or mortgages. It can be an absolutely gorgeous, selfish, powerful moment for women -- and as liltingly serene as Scialfa's "Lullaby." But sometimes -- often, in fact -- that same period of rootlessness really blows.

Just listen to "Romeo," a track that may or may not be about Springsteen. (It would be lovely to think that it's not. After all, her husband has loved his Marys, Janies, Candys, Wendys, and Sandys for so long, it would be nice to know whom Scialfa loved ... before.) But her decision to bookend the liner-note lyrics of "Romeo" with a photo of herself in a wedding dress and the only photograph of Springsteen on the CD suggests that the song could be about those ugly years he spent married to another woman. Or maybe Romeo is a figment of her imagination. In any case, she's mourning a man who's left her. "You're part of me forever/ Like a troublesome tattoo," sings Scialfa. Curled up "in someone else's arms" in Chelsea, she tortures herself over the guy: "I believe in heaven above/ And when I look in your eyes/ I believe I still see love/ Well maybe I will never know/ Just why you walked away/ Did you think I wasn't good enough?/ Or were you just afraid." Anyone who's ever spent a similar night will feel their stomach clench. Remember the soul-gobbling misery? The conviction that the only person who's right for you -- rogue, married, deluded -- has left you to a life of empty encounters with nameless, faceless, wrong people who will never know you as he did? "I lay awake at night/ Curse your name into the dark/ While the memory of you rings/ Like a church bell through my heart." For those of us still out there, the images are almost uncomfortably vivid.

It's just one of the songs on "23rd Street Lullaby" that seems as if it must have been written 20 years ago. How could a woman married for more than a decade recall that deadened feeling of hopelessness so specifically? Isn't it one of those pains that is supposed to get reabsorbed by the body -- like childbirth -- as soon as it's finished? I had hoped so.

However clear her memories -- or however long these tunes have been sitting in her notebook -- Scialfa has put some distance between herself and 23rd Street. In "You Can't Go Back," she discovers just that, after "looking for a piece of my past/ on these streets that I once knew." It's unclear whether her revelation that she will never be able to case her old haunts in anonymity again is recent, or whether it first occurred to her when the song opens, in "New York City/ 1988/ Standing in the Chelsea rain/ With a small suitcase." It was in June of 1988 that the Italian paparazzi ensured that Scialfa would never go back to her invisible city life again. It's a year that also comes up in "Rose," when she sings "Now listen ... I traveled once with this/ Rock'n'roll band/ And my baby was a hero/ At every small town bar/ And I watched that summer of '88/ Pass through the rear-view mirror/ Of his rented car." Whether or not the E Street Band was traveling via Avis is immaterial; Scialfa's interest in 1988 betrays her understanding that that was the year that gave shape not only to her future, but to her past.

A single and unsettled youth exists as a blur. You never know when or if or how it will end -- with money, romance, kids, a move? It's a period defined by its utter lack of certainty, and thus a period that is hard to define at all until something about it changes. It's in that moment of transformation -- whether it's finding love with a ridiculously hot and brilliant rock star or, you know, moving into a nicer apartment -- that whatever has come before gets thrown into focus. It takes shape and becomes more beautiful than it ever previously appeared -- precisely because it's about to end. Maybe that's what 1988 was for Scialfa, the moment that she realized that she got the guy and the life she never thought would be hers, and in doing so, cut herself off completely from whatever had been hers and hers alone in New York City.

Recent Stories