When the Straight catches up with Shivaree's Ambrosia Parsley, she's home in New York after three-and-a-half weeks spent swanning about Europe on a promotional tour with her bandmates, guitarist Duke McVinnie and keyboardist Danny McGough. The singer insists, however, that her jet-setting lifestyle isn't as glamorous as it sounds. "I was in Berlin, and then I was in Paris, and then I was in London, and then I was in Amsterdam, and then I was in Brussels," she says. "And I didn't leave the hotel in almost any of those places. And I don't like to fly. So if you add the bits of the day where we were actually playing music, it's like five minutes here on the radio, an hour here on TV-we did nine songs straight in France, so that was fun because we got to play. But then you just put that against all the time you're not playing, and you're flying, and most of it's kind of a drag."

Spending a lot of time in transit is de rigueur for a trio that has a sizable following overseas but remains something of a cult act at home. Shivaree impressed critics and discerning music freaks everywhere when it made its recorded debut with 1999's I Oughtta Give You a Shot in the Head for Making Me Live in This Dump, a collection of deliciously twisted Americana that sounded like a drive down some lost highway in the company of Hank Williams, Tom Waits, and Billie Holiday.

The trio's fortunes changed three years later when its label underwent a regime change. "It's that same old boring story that happens, like, 50 times every day to somebody who's trapped on a major who shouldn't be there," Parsley recalls. "A new record-company president comes in-I think this was the third or fourth one since we had been on Capitol-and eventually you're just not gonna get along with one of them. And they can either make it an easy exit or they can make it ugly, and we ended up with about nine or 10 months of red tape just getting out of there, doing nothing, not playing any music at all."

Shivaree's sophomore effort, 2002's Rough Dreams, never saw a stateside release. It did come out in Europe, though, which might explain the trio's continental following. Listeners on these shores would do well to track down Shivaree's latest CD, Who's Got Trouble?. The disc is a fine showcase for Parsley's sensuously smoky voice and her tales of intrigue and conspiracy, both romantic and political. The band shows its diversity via the spy-movie lounge noir of "I Close My Eyes" and the late-night country-soul of "It Got All Black", and proves just as adept at covering 1950s R&B classics (Smiley Lewis's "Someday") and 1970s art rock (Brian Eno's "The Fat Lady of Limbourg"). The album is good enough to earn Shivaree, which plays Richard's on Richards on Sunday (April 10), a North American audience rivalling its European one.

"It's a surprise to be able to make a living doing music anywhere in the world," Parsley says. "You have such little control over what people think or how people are going to take onboard what you do. All you can do is write your songs and make your records, and that's all you really have reign over and everything else is sort of just chaos. So it's a surprise to me that anybody found it and likes it."