The Cheap and Evil Girl
The Cheap and Evil Girl opens with guitar and sets the tone immediately. Bree Sharp writes and sings with a directness that stood apart from much of what was on the radio in 1999. She grew up on Bob Dylan, Patti Smith and Elvis Costello. You can hear all three in how she holds a melody and where she chooses not to explain herself. The production varies across the record. Multiple producers worked on different tracks. The center holds because Sharp’s songwriting does not move off its position. She named the album one word away from this song’s title. Not the song about David Duchovny. Not the single about America. The title track. The one that tells you exactly who you are dealing with.
Sharp was born in Philadelphia in 1975. As a teenager she played coffee shops around the city with an acoustic guitar, writing three-minute folk songs. At seventeen she moved to New York City to study theater at NYU, where she trained with David Mamet’s theater company. She settled in Manhattan after graduating and kept writing. One of the songs she wrote was about David Duchovny. She recorded a demo and the tape eventually reached The X-Files set. Two production assistants created a video for the set’s Christmas party featuring Duchovny and dozens of celebrities lip-syncing the lyrics. The video was never officially released but circulated underground. Trauma Records heard the song and signed her in 1998. The demo that got her the deal was also the song that made her famous before the album came out.
The album debuted at number forty-seven on Billboard’s Top Heatseekers chart. Sharp played Lilith Fair in the summer of 1999 and toured the following year with Bush and Moby as part of MTV’s Campus Invasion Tour. She left Trauma Records in 2001 and released her second album on a label she founded and named Ahimsa. She worked in sketch comedy at the Upright Citizens Brigade. She became the brand voice of E*Trade and appeared in two Super Bowl commercials. In 2018 she co-founded Coney Island Baby on Avenue A in the East Village with her debut album’s producer Don DiLego. In 2019 she held a concert there to mark the twentieth anniversary of this record. In 2024 David Duchovny interviewed her on his podcast about the song, twenty-five years after the fact. Twenty-seven years ago today a songwriter from Philadelphia released a debut album and named it after exactly who she was.