Save for her second-banana stint in the now-defunct Loveless, the once-hot solo artist Jen Trynin has spent much of the past seven years explaining why she doesn’t play music anymore. Her new book, Everything I’m Cracked Up To Be, is meant to be the answer. It’s at least the smartest and funniest account you’ll hear of how it felt to be an underground artist caught in the post-Nirvana feeding frenzy — complete with industry dish and revelations of an affair with one former band member.
She drew a full house to Friday’s reading at the Attic in Newton and celebrated by playing an official Jen Trynin set for the first time in seven years. (She’s played her own songs just once in the interim, solo during a reading at the Kendall Café.) Backed by three long-time compatriots — second guitarist Bill Guerra, bassist Ed Valauskas, and drummer Tom Polce — she did a tidy set of four songs from each of her two albums. She admitted to having butterflies when the band joined her but seemed as tough and scrappy on stage as ever: for all the book’s protests to the contrary, Trynin has always slung her guitar like a natural rock-and-roller.
If you want to get cynical, you can say the real mystery isn’t why she never made it big but why a songwriter this loud and literate was ever allowed the chance. Certainly, the songs she played from her Cockamamie — the funkified “Everything’s Different Now” and the big-hook rocker “Better Than Nothing” — still sound like hit singles that should’ve happened. But the songs from Gun Shy Trigger Happy — the haunting “February” and the slow-building “Everything” — showed her writing getting more adventurous, more individual. It was hard to avoid thinking she gave up too soon.
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