the Thirteenth Confession, watched as the Fifth Dimension ("Wedding Bell Blues"), Three Dog Night ("Eli's Coming") and Blood, Sweat and Tears ("And When I Die") plucked hit after hit from her pop-soul songbook.

Nyro, of course, dropped out shortly thereafter, swapping her chart success and eccentric chic for marriage, motherhood and a reclusion that has since been only intermittently suspended for a scattering of albums and stage appearances. Walk the Dog and Light the Light, her first studio offering since Mother's Spiritual in 1984, is utterly irresistible, if slight and – as the title suggests – a little daft. In a New Jack world in which synths, samples and rhythm boxes prevail, Nyro's pianobased soul music, so retro and spare, and her remarkable singing voice, so exuberant and expressive, sound transporting.

Walk the Dog kicks off evocatively as Nyro sets the ingenuous blush of the Crystals' "Oh Yeah, Maybe Baby" – another of her superlative R&B covers – against the soul-deep maturity of her own "A Woman of the World." Nyro's genius for crafting pop-soul confections continues unabated with "The Descent of Luna Rosé," which hitches its propulsive groove to a lyric that is dedicated to – and this is where things start to get weird – Nyro's period ("It's that time of the month/So lighten up"). Any truly provocative writing ends there, however, as the soul sister-turned-earth mother essays a panoply of PC themes. Delectable but evanescent odes to world peace, animal rights, "kick-ass women artists," Native Americans and life on the road sail by before Nyro ends the set with a remake of her own "To a Child" and a medley that merges Curtis Mayfield's "I'm So Proud" with the Shirelles' "Dedicated to the One I Love." All undeniably melodic, all irrefutably sincere, all faintly insubstantial, all in 37 minutes. Lite delite, indeed.

At precisely the time that Nyro was fleeing the spotlight, Jimmy Webb was yearning for it. So total was his desire for recognition as an interpreter of his own work that Webb spent the better part of his young adult life pursuing it. Six albums released between 1970 and 1982 were credible artistically but ignored by consumers. Although his stature as a pop craftsman never flagged, such was the depth of Webb's disappointment that he moved east, abandoning the West Coast and its mockery of dead-end d