and one, "I Am A Child," by Neil Young.

Smither's own songs are deceptively easy-going. The album opens with "A Short While Ago," a bouncy, good-timey tune about misguided love, loneliness and "a brave man" who "never looks down." It starts with a smooth, sliding guitar line, reminiscent, in its finely-crafted way, of some of Jorma Kaukonen's work on Hot Tuna. The band, an anonymously competent assemblage of bass, drums and second guitar, fills in behind.

Smither's phrasing is emphatic, self-conscious. The music is engaging and beautifully integrated, but it is the words we are here for; words put together with a real facility and feeling for the language. Smither has an uncanny knack for using old, almost cliched, phrases and extracting subtle and precise meanings from them: "He's told me twice/That love is blind./I've told him once/That I don't mind."

In "A Song For Susan," he refers to himself in the third person, using the pronoun "one," and evokes an image of towering dignity: "Years of indignation./Here's what it's come to:/One who believes./He can tell you he loves you." This is a slow song, about the effects of a good woman. "Open your eyes/She's not one for losers."

The music of Chris Smither sits very comfortably on the mind. The songs are about loving and not being able to, about women who can't appreciate a good man, about good men who, nevertheless, are poor, and above all, about keeping on. And it all sounds so simple and easy. Why didn't I say that? is the immediate response.

This sensitivity and dignity pervades all of Smither's work. These songs do not assault the senses, but one is well advised to pay close attention to what goes on, for it is the working of a very complex sensibility. (RS 79)

FREDERICK JOHANSON