Volcano

Most women sign up for university classes once they get the kids off to school. But not Edie Brickell. The quirky singer who led the Texas-based roots rock titans the New Bohemians to chart glory in 1990 with the slacker anthem "What I Am" is making another run at the charts with her first solo album in almost a decade. Married to Paul Simon for the past nine years, Brickell thankfully wasn't watching soap operas while raising her three children. Instead, she diligently studied acoustic guitar with Howard Morgen, penned more than a dozen new songs in the past two years, and then called up her Texas crony Charlie Sexton to produce her first album since her inconsistent, yet lyrically beautiful, Picture Perfect Morning back in 1994. Less frenetic and verbose than the stuff she did with the Bohemians, Volcano finds the singer collecting small, seemingly mundane moments and elevating them to a folksy profundity as she weaves her tales of restless, ill-starred, but proud women. The title track seethes with restlessness, and is underpinned with a gothic tension that recalls the young Bobbie Gentry on her smash hit "Ode to Billie Joe." Equally chilling, and just as poignant, is her sad tale of love and abandonment on "What Would You Do," showing Brickell's growing narrative talents. When she's not spinning her disturbing tales, Brickell is the consummate chanteuse as she recounts her courtship to Simon on the breathy and seductive "Once In A Blue Moon," or fogs up the windows in "More than Friends"--the thinking women's love song. --Jaan Uhelszki