If you were Clint Black and your debut album remained Number One on the country charts for twenty-eight weeks, you might ask, "What next?" On his follow-up, Put Yourself in My Shoes, Black provides the answer. He continues staking out eclectic turf and, with his co-writer Hayden Nicholas, advances a point of view that is rather uncommon in the country mainstream – tender but unsentimental, tough but courageous enough to admit vulnerability.

Against producer James Stroud's uncluttered aural backdrop, Black uses his expressive baritone, so reminiscent of the young Merle Haggard's, to probe life's travails. The lilting, bittersweet folk strains of "The Gulf of Mexico" are of a piece with Jimmy Buffett's more poignant musings on love gone wrong. "This Night Life" comes straight out of the roadhouse, with Nicholas's sizzling lead guitar goosing Black's impassioned but even-tempered vocal. "The Goodnight Loving" is a cowboy ballad tracing a Rebel soldier's long ride to freedom.

Like Killin' Time before it, Put Yourself in My Shoes is predictable only in its unpredictability as it mines in compelling and graceful style the richness of the country-music tradition. Demonstrating a penchant for genre busting and a growing facility for artful wordplay, Clint Black is about to enter that exclusive realm of forward-thinking singer-songwriters who compete not with their peers but with the legacy of American music. Looks like he's hung the moon again. (RS 595)

DAVID MCGEE