(Click Here to download "Dry," Drugstore's awesome MUSICBLITZ Exclusive!)

This Drugstore offers just one cure for the music industry blues: keep cranking out great tunes until you find the right place to do business.

The UK quartet with a taste for life's darker side has had to throw up the "closed" sign for long stretches over the past few years because of label woes. But Drugstore is getting ready to open up shop again, thanks in large part to the determined, proudly Brazilian (and need we add sexy?) Isabel Monteiro.

Isabel isn't exactly one to sit crying in her beer over life's curveballs. After her husband died in a car crash when she was just a teenager, she packed up, moved to England and began playing out, where her gritty, beguiling vocals caught the ear of another ex-patriot, L.A. drummer Mike Chylinski. The two formed Drugstore (named after the Gus Van Zandt flick "Drugstore Cowboy") in 1992, pressed their own debut single, "Alive," on their own label, and watched it become Melody Maker's Single of the Week. Adding guitarist Daron Robinson, the fledgling group signed to Go! Discs and cranked out a self-titled '95 debut that won raves for its raw but often beautiful music for headphones, fixated on the characters at life's fringes.

Then the real fun started. A second album laid in state for months while Go! Discs sorted through battles with its parent company. By the time it was all sorted out, Drugstore had lost valuable momentum, and signed to American indie label Roadrunner for the long-awaited White Magic for Lovers in 1998. Despite a UK top 20 hit ("El Presidente," a duet with Radiohead's Thom Yorke), Roadrunner passed on another album, and the group got to play the waiting game again, this time for 18 months.

Not that it seems to have bummed out Ms. Monteiro and Co. -- Drugstore now has its third album, Songs for the Jetset, in the can, set for release in early 2001 on Global Warming Records. And the band's new single, the sexy, sex-changing romp "I Wanna Love You Like A Man," is their most exuberant musical blast yet.

Just to show you what rugged individualist she is, Monteiro decided to do this interview the old-fashioned way: she took a list of our questions and scribbled out her answers during a soundcheck at a recent UK gig. So, without further ado…

You guys were in label limbo for a year before "White Magic" came out, and now you've spent another year and a half doing it again. Did this last label-less go-round give you that "here we go again" feeling?
Roadrunner was pretty much a one-off thing -- I never imagined we would have had a long-term "happy-ever after" with a label that basically are good at working with heavy metal bands, would you?! When we split from Roadrunner, there were quite a few labels on our tails, but they all seem to want another album ready straight away. But I felt that after all the touring and promo we'd done for "White Magic," we really needed a break -- so that's what we did.

There were rumors earlier in the year that Drugstore had decided to split, which were denied immediately. How close to true were they? How'd you hold things together, in any event?
One minute I tell people I'm taking a break, next thing I know people are talking about a split! We have friendship and devotion towards our band that most people probably can't see -- but it's definitely there.

I haven't tried to download boots of the new album off Napster yet -- but based on the the new exclusive ("Dry") you guys have here on MUSICBLITZ, and reports of recent live shows, the new material sounds mellower -- more strings and acoustic-based. Goal or accident?
Spot on. I worked a lot at home by myself, just getting a good atmosphere on each track. This time I knew exactly where I wanted to go, and I'm so thrilled with the results I could easily spend the rest of this paper going on about it -- but you're just gonna have to wait! It's mellow and beautiful…

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