by LORRAINE CARPENTER

"There's a lot going on on the record," says Shivaree singer Ambrosia Parsley. "Your basics - your sex, your death, your love, your family, your fucked-up government."

As typical or topical as her themes may be, Parsley's lyrics bear an ambiguity that suits her torch-singer allure and the minimal saloon-cum-cabaret creations of her bandmates Duke McVinnie (guitar) and Danny McGough (keys). On the heels of the Breach EP and a prominent spot on the Kill Bill 2 soundtrack, Who's Got Trouble is Shivaree's third LP, following their lauded 1999 debut, I Oughtta Give You a Shot in the Head for Making Me Live in This Dump, and 2002's Rough Dreams, which was never released in North America due to a dispute with their old label.

"They actually gave me back the song ‘You've Gone Too Far,' which is on the new record," Parsley says. "So I saved a kitten, they weren't all drowned."

Rolling with the punches is routine for Parsley, whose music career has been bizarre from the start. As a toddler, she learned jazz-age ditties from her eccentric grandmother who lived in a trailer plugged in to Parsley's San Fernando Valley home. "Da Uke Lady," as the ukulele-playing granny was known, also booked seven-year-old Ambrosia's first gig.

"There was a Shakey's Pizza up the street where I started singing with a piano player, and then I was promoted to the bigger Shakey's in the next town," Parsley explains. "I sang there with a 99-piece, senior-citizen banjo band, which shrunk rapidly because they were constantly dying."

Inspired by her family's rock 'n' roll ukulele and West Virginian mountain music, along with the likes of Billie Holiday and Nina Simone, Parsley never stopped writing songs, and eventually began recording with friends-of-friends McVinnie and McGough. It wasn't long before labels came knocking, but Parsley had to sit through her first two years on stage so her knees wouldn't do the same.

By 2003, she was standing, with stage fright behind her and Shivaree on the move - the moniker is a Southern expression meaning a mock or drunken serenade. Parsley then landed a gig on the liberal talk-radio station Air America, Ambrosia Sings the News, a brief summary of the week's events in the form of 30-second, '40s-style jingles, a perfect match to her smoke-and-honey voice. (The segment airs every Friday at five minutes to the hour from 9 a.m. to noon, www.airamericaradio.com.)

"I thought it would be a fun exercise to write new lyrics to the same song every week, and hopefully provide a bit of a laugh in the middle of a program that's delivering a lot of horrible information."

From the torture of prisoners at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib to the sex scandals of politicians and pundits, Parsley's subject matter is often disturbing. As with The Daily Show, whose co-creator Lizz Winstead also conceived Ambrosia Sings the News, the trick is finding the line between dark comedy and bad taste.

"You have to pick appropriate things to make funny because there's so much every single day that just isn't," Parsley says. "I never expected to wake up in the morning and have politics on my mind, and now here I am, but with most of the country in the same boat."

At Main Hall on Monday, Feb. 14, 8:30 p.m., $12.50

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