"Keep It To Yourself"

Amy Rigby/Marti Jones

Well, here's a tale. I was in the gym the other day, dialing up my Latin Groove playlist to accompany my stationary bike ride, when this song cycled up (no pun intended). I thought to myself, "Oh, hello, I never noticed before how sly this song is, pairing that langorous bossa nova beat with such deliciously nasty female snark. This just has to be Amy Rigby, right?" So I fumbled with the damn iPod holster, dropped it, accidentally fast-forwarded, yadda yadda yadda, only to finally read on the playlist that this was a track by the lovely Marti Jones, from her delectable 2014 album You're Not the Bossa Me. 

Which, by the way, I highly recommend.* 

But I digress. As it happens, I downloaded my version of You're Not the Bossa Me, and my music library therefore doesn't show composer info. (GRRRrrr....). No biggie, I guess, to the kids. But it kept nagging me. I knew that Marti's album came to my attention in the first place because the wonderful songwriter Bill DeMain had co-written some tracks on it, and I began to suspect he'd had a hand in this track, too. I just had to know.

And when I reached out to Bill, he confirmed that, yes, he'd co-written "Keep It to Yourself" . . . with none other than Amy Rigby. 

Go figure.

 Amy's version, a demo track, only appeared on her 2002 anthology album 18 Again -- and I'll confess, I have that album, I've got that track in my library, I should have recognized it immediately. Mea culpa. But the good news is that this made me appreciate this wicked little song all over again.

The premise is dead simple, laid down in verse one. She's got a new boyfriend -- a good one this time -- and, to prove his fealty, he's tilting at her windmills. "You say you'd like to kill the man who broke my heart," she starts out, sounding oh so modest, dismissing the idea. ("Me I'm trying so hard to forgive...")

But then comes the about face, the pivot point: Almost shyly (there's the gift of the bossa nova), she just kinda sorta mentions, "But here's his address / Here's his picture / Here's the make and model of his car." Nothing like fingering a perp. And she off-handedly supplies additional info, "He works until four-thirty / Then he hangs out at the topless bar." And with a rueful duck of the head, she adds, "With a girl on each arm / If he should come to harm -- "  The bossa beat kicks in for a pregnant pause pause, before she exhales, "Just keep it to yourself...."

I won't give away any more of the plot -- it unspools like Double Indemnity. It's a perfect storm of wit, snark, and musical style, and it makes me laugh every single time I hear it. No matter who sings it.

 * As you might be able to guess from that title, everything on this album has a bossa nova beat. Latin music 101: Bossa nova was a late 1950s-early1960s reinvention of samba, making things smoother, more chic, more palatable to PanAm sophisticates. It made samba ripe for crossover, and in the early 60s lots of UK and US artists tested the bossa nova waters -- see the Kinks "No Return" or the Beatles' version of "Till There Was You").