Wheel
Rosanne Cash went through some major changes after 1990's critical triumphInteriors. She divorced her longtime producer and husband Rodney Crowell, she moved from Nashville to Manhattan, and she shifted her career from Columbia's country division to its pop division. What hasn't changed is her music.The Wheelboasts the same kind of extremely personal portraits of troubled marriage and unsettled womanhood set to the same sort of lucid folk-pop as her previous three albums. No one in Anglo-American pop does it better. Cash is the Billie Holiday of country singers. Her small voice sometimes wanders off pitch, but she invests her soft, close-microphone vocals with so much core emotion that she creates the illusion of whispering the most intimate secrets into each listener's ear. Her translucent voice projects such resilient strength that the listener's reaction is not pity but gratitude for the confidence. --Geoffrey Himes