St. Pete-based singer/songwriter Geri X will release her first album on a label next week. It's called Anthems of a Mended Heart (24 Hour Service Station), and it's definitely worth your while. She'll be on the cover of next week's CL. She really opened up about her life and her past, which has long been open to speculation and rumor.

I sat with Geri X and her bassist/boyfriend Greg Roteik in the small courtyard of their home. Our interview ranged over a wide array of topics. I got on my usual rant about how the Tampa Bay music scene, while it has a lot of terrific acts, can never seem to reach out past the people who are already connected to the scene.

It's not the musicians' fault, in my opinion. The rank-and-file folk who live around here just aren't dialed in to going out and seeing live music by locally based acts. The people who live three doors down from me, for instance, (whom I barely know) — I'm all but certain they're not planning to see what's shaking at New World this weekend.

This is a dinner-and-a-movie town, or a drop-a-hundred-on-The-Eagles town.

Geri X largely agreed with me in this matter, but she has her own way of reaching out beyond the scene. You might even say it's novel:

This article appears in Jan 7-13, 2009.

Eric Snider is the dean of Bay area music critics. He started in the early 1980s as one of the founding members of Music magazine, a free bi-monthly. He was the pop music critic for the then-St. Petersburg...