Nights When I Am Sane
As a hard-to-classify country-folk-pop-cabaret singer who hates to tour, Mickey Newbury has often seemed more a rumor than an actual presence in the music industry.Nights When I Am Saneis divided between seven of his best older songs and six new ones (plus a version of the old standard "Easy Street"). Because his earlier albums haven't resurfaced on CD (rumor has it the master tapes are lost),Nightsserves as his introduction to a whole generation who may have heard of him but has never heard him. It fulfills this purpose admirably. The arrangements consist of nothing more than two acoustic guitars (Newbury's and Jack Williams's); Newbury's voice, much darker and smarter at age 54 than it was in his early 30s, has plenty of room to explore the nooks and crannies of these older songs. Few are the singer-songwriters who can evoke within the same song this inevitable torment and ultimate redemption as powerfully as Newbury does here.--Geoffrey Himes