Pay Before You Pump
"Pay Before You Pump" is former NRBQ guitarist Al Anderson's third solo  album, a country rock effort with an emphasis on the rock. When he remakes his song  "Lonely Too Long," he allows distortion to creep into his guitar riff; by contrast,  Anderson's version of "Without Your Love" is even more quiet and understated than  Tippin's, but when Anderson sings, "Danced with the devil in a bottle of whiskey,"  there's a stark terror in his husky whisper. Music Row hitmaker Bob DiPiero cowrote  two songs with Anderson and they're the most country-sounding tracks on "Pay Before  You Pump." "Change Is Gonna Do Me Good" (a thinly disguised rewrite of Sam Cooke's  "A Change Is Gonna Come") is an old-fashioned gospel hymn, while "Under the Hood"  uses more automobile metaphors than you can count.--Geoffrey Himes