Pink sunset blooms over a sticky evening in New York, and it feels even stickier down in the Lower East Side between the dense conglomeration of old, graffiti-strewn brick and steel tenements. Teany, a cafe right across from Paul's Boutique, is where Sasha Bell has chosen to meet and she looks radiant, perfectly at home in the urban jungle. "There's a novelty to living here that never seems to wear off...There's always something that will keep my interest, even if it's some mundane thing like a piece of trash floating in the gutter."

Bell inspired by trash? It doesn't sound in concert with the ethereal voice and elegant keyboard work she's graced across five years of work in The Ladybug Transistor and The Essex Green. But her latest project, fronting The Finishing School and their debut Destination Girl , shows Bell sharpening a self-determined edge of exploration. It won't get her kicked out of indie rock twee camp--all pastoral psychedelia is retained in shades of Fairport Convention, Lee Hazlewood, the usual references. But it shows a healthy outgrowth: the muscle of grrl power.

"The Finishing School record was a huge creative turning point for me in terms of how I sing. It was the first time I'd been singing about anything I cared about. I'd sung my own songs [with Ladybug/Essex Green], but they just didn't have any emotional impact. Like I'd sing about a cat in a court, or you know, they were just more abstract. But with this, I was feeling it as I was doing it."

The emotional catalyst occurred in summer of 2001, shortly after Bell's break-up of a seven-year romance with Jeff Baron, guitarist of Ladybug and Essex. With access to a piano while housesitting in the Catskills, all the songs for Destination Girl and Essex Green's The Long Goodbye poured out of her. "I was feeling just sort of different towards the world and myself. Like, I was just going out on my own in many different kinds of ways."

"I wrote all those songs over the summer, and then [Ladybug Transistor] went on tour that fall. We were hanging out in Stockholm and I was telling [recording engineer] Tom Hakava about all these songs, and he was like, 'I'll be your Phil Spector, let's do it!' He's got an amazing studio, all 16-track, 2-inch tape, everything vintage, analogue, every little doodad and device....really cool. We did it all in a week [in August of 2002], then I mixed it in London, so all in all it took less than three weeks."

The baby-faced songstress returned to her home in Brooklyn with a nostalgic obsession for Sweden, but forced to juggle new albums and tours for all her groups--on top of a day job. She admits that Essex Green and Ladybug Transistor have a collective chemistry in which everyone's contribution is crucial, despite multiple crossovers within numerous projects.

"You have to be really careful, you have to plan in advance and pray that no one gets sick or butts heads. It can get a little emotionally dodgy. You know, questioning your loyalty to one band over the other, even though you've dedicated your life to both for the past 10 years."

During the Finishing School's residency at New York's Knitting Factory, Bell looked confident and in control. From her barstool, beer in hand, she shouted to the opening band, encouraged them to "play all you want," then later commanded center stage, seated in frilly white dress and sandals at her '50s tube Wurlitzer. The group was tight, bristling with pop energy.

"It's really fun to play these songs... there's something about the feel of it that's different. And it really affects how you play. You can really feel the songs from beginning to end, like it's going somewhere." And where it's going is exactly where Bell's destination awaits.

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