"Music to wash dishes by" is how Amy Rigby once described 1996's Diary of a Mod Housewife, and you'd be hard pressed to find a more appropriate description. It was on that career-defining solo debut, after all, that the alt-country crooner documented with heartbreaking detail the dissolution of her marriage to ex-dB Will Rigby, drawing repeatedly on the maddening monotony and minutiae of domesticity – diaper pails, doctor bills, broken furnaces – to illustrate how her once-enthralling relationship "[gave] way to dealing with a list of demands." The New York-via-Nashville narratives on Diary and its follow-ups, 1998's Middlesense and 2000's The Sugar Tree, were packed with such slice-of-life intimacy and homespun humor that it made perfect sense to listen to them while standing over the kitchen sink – which was probably where Rigby wrote most of 'em anyway.

No matter how moving and impeccably made they are, however, songs about housework, rocky marriages, and motherhood don't move units the way those about sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll do, and so it's both unfortunate and unsurprising that Rigby's albums have gone out of print so quickly. Recently dropped from Koch, her label of six years, she's offering one last chance to bring latecomers up to speed with 18 Again, a single-disc reissue of nearly half of her catalog and including the previously unreleased "Keep It to Yourself."