Lying to the Moon & Other Stories
What doDeana Carter's "Strawberry Wine,"Patty Loveless's "You Can Feel Bad," andTrisha Yearwood's "XXX's and OOO's" have in common? They were all No. 1 country hits, they all had stories you could visualize and hooks you could hum, and they were all cowritten by Matraca Berg. So why isn't Berg a country star herself? Does she have a froggy voice? No way. A homely face? Hardly. Well, what is it then? It might be the hint of intelligence in her big, confident soprano, the suggestion that she knows more than she's letting on. Country radio hates that. Critics and fellow musicians, on the other hand, love it and have been huge Berg fans for years. RCA is giving the wider public a second chance with this new anthology, which includes a dozen songs found on her out-of-print solo albums. The new disc doesn't include any of the singles she's written for other artists, though a few have been album cuts for Yearwood,Suzy Bogguss,Pam Tillis, andLinda Ronstadt. The collection does includes several gems that would be hits in a fairer world: the eloquent Midwestern evocation of "Calico Plains," the late-night romantic desperation of "Lying to the Moon," and the lovely mountain balladry of "Appalachian Rain." Snap this one up before it, too, goes out of print.--Geoffrey Himes