The Music Is Out There
  New CD gets boost from fans of X-Files television series

  Bree Sharp's debut CD, "Cheap and Evil Girl," is good.

  In fact, it's great. It's stunning, lively, thought-provoking, it's got a beat and you can dance to it, and if there's any justice in the musical world, it will make Bree Sharp a star.

  The ironic part of all this is that, as good as the album is, it might well have gone unnoticed were it not for the buzz surrounding the just-released single, "David Duchovny," an entertaining and often humorous tribute to the actor who plays Special Agent Fox Mulder on "The X-Files."

  Fortunately, "David Duchovny" is getting lots of attention, so it shouldn't be long before the CD starts to shoot up on the charts and everyone finds out what a few X-Files fans have already learned: New York's Bree Sharp, 23, is as talented and witty as the man she praises in her song.

  But "David Duchovny" isn't all there is to "Cheap and Evil Girl." Not by a long shot.

  Sharp, with co-writer Simon Austin, has produced a CD with at least a half-dozen other songs that could easily stand on their own as singles, weaving a lyrical path through the pain of losing love, of betraying loved ones and of facing death when faith in a life beyond has been shattered.

  The strongest track is "Smitten," an angst-ridden exploration of a woman's feelings for her friend's lover: "In a dimly lighted bar/We sit while Conscience pours another/And she is home, and she is waiting/She my friend, she your lover ... Sickened by the season/I am smitten with you/Saddled with this treason ..."

  In "Fallen," Sharp takes a gentle, sad look at the painful task of trying to explain life, death and evil to a child while dealing with one's own loss of faith ("Where are the angels, angels, angels?/I cannot tell you, my little darling/All my faith has fallen, fallen, fallen.").

  "Walk Away" uses the receding tide as a simile for the end of a relationship; not an original idea, but Sharp handles it with originality, with passion and without schmaltz.

  Through the entire CD, Sharp does an intelligent balancing act between humor and hurt, between appearance and reality. The humor-with-a-purpose comes back in "Guttermouth" and in the title track as Sharp takes on the concept of "bad girls" with a satirical twist that borders on sarcasm.

  Anyway, when Sharp rhymes "DNA" with "T&A," you just gotta laugh.

  But what about the song that's getting all the buzz, the "novelty song" that's got X-Files fans burning up Internet bandwidth by the gigabyte just to look at the unofficial video?

  It's every bit as good as the rest of the album. And no matter what you've heard, it's not a novelty song, either, any more than David Duchovny is Fox Mulder.

  "David Duchovny" is funny, taking gentle jabs at "the man, the myth, the monotone," a reference to Duchovny's sometimes deadpan delivery (at which he himself poked fun in "The X-Files" movie), and the refrain, "David Duchovny, why won't you love me?" is just plain catchy.

  Behind the humor, however, "David Duchovny" is an insightful, sometimes dismaying look at the cult of celebrity in America and just how far some fans will go to make contact with the stars they adore.

  The love-struck narrator starts off acknowledging that she's "just another fan/But I can't help feeling I could/love this secret agent man," confusing the actor - as she does throughout the song - with the character he portrays. By the final verse, she's packing her bags for Nevada (home of UFO-legendary Area 51) to join her idol, screaming in the refrain, "I'm gonna kill Scully!"

  Special Agent Dana Scully, of course, is Mulder's skeptical partner and is regarded by a substantial group of "X-Files" fans as his true love, hence the jealous threat. One can't help wondering what Duchovny's co-star, Gillian Anderson, thinks of that line.

  In spite of the scary moments, the song does work as a tribute. No Duchovny fan could argue with lyrics such as "I've got it bad for David Duchovny." (You and a few million other women, Bree; the line forms on the left, and I was here first.)

  Or how about, "From those eyes I can't leave/And you can say I'm naive/But he told me to believe," one of the song's two references to Duchovny's eyes, which, for the uninitiated, are hazel, incredibly expressive and absolutely beautiful, unbelievably gorgeous . . .

  Uh ... sorry about the outburst. Please excuse us. We get carried away sometimes. We'd better not even start speculating about what Sharp means when she pleads for Duchovny to "kiss and to hug me/debrief and debug me."

  The CD is out there. It was released July 27 on the Trauma Records label. Go out and buy it. You'll thank us later.