Danielle Brisebois’s angst-ridden attack on the world’s hypocrisies, “What If God Fell from the Sky,” mysteriously failed to strike a chord the way Alanis Morrisette’s “You Oughta Know” did just one year later. Unfortunately, an entire album, Arrive All Over You, was left behind to collect dust in the mortuary of Out Of Print. The equally powerful “Ain’t Gonna Cry No More” finds the singer purging her closet of all its skeletons while the soaring rocker “Did I Lead You On” begs to refill it. Thanks in part to producer/songwriter Gregg Alexander, Arrive is considerably more sophisticated than most other pop/rock offerings (“You’re in no hurry/My hands are already there…But I’ll be true/Won’t talk to snakes by trees”). The classic ballad “Just Missed the Train” is so brutally honest (and so sorrowfully sung) that it almost hurts: “So sleep darling/Why don’t you pretend we were just a dream?” Its simple metaphor of love and loss can be traced through the album’s end, the self-explicatory “Welcome to Love – Now Go Home.” While her follow-up, Portable Life, has been indefinitely shelved by RCA, Brisebois found success in 1999 as part of Alexander’s New Radicals.
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