raucous "Only Want You More"; and he adds melodrama galore to the weeper "Yet to Succeed." Yoakam – who has garnered critical acclaim for his acting ability – deftly becomes each victim or victor in the torturous game of love described in most of the album's thirteen songs.

Yet when Yoakam reveals his introspective side, his singing takes on a soulfulness that's only hinted at in his well-crafted character studies. He has never sounded more earnest than on the wistful, Dobro-drenched title track: "Don't look inside/No, don't look there/'Cause you might find/Yourself somewhere." And on the extraordinary "Traveler's Lantern," Yoakam has retraced his ancestral path, enlisting the aid of Ralph Stanley, the seventy-one-year-old elder statesman of old-time-y mountain music. Stanley's plaintive tenor offers a twangy counterpoint to Yoakam's rich baritone, and on the chorus, the pair's harmonizing swells with a fervor straight out of the Baptist Church: "Won't you set out a traveler's lantern/Just a small light that they might see/To guide them back home/Before they wander/Into the dark billows/That crash on the sea." A long way home, indeed. Yoakam has dug down deep and come up with a blue-ribbon hybrid of honky-tonk pastiche and reflective country soul. (RS 792)

HOLLY GEORGE-WARREN