I happen to like "The Language of Love," the new single from Dan Fogelberg's ninth album. I like the squealy organ chords, the moderately rockish guitar solo and Fogelberg's hoarse, relatively passionate vocal. Okay? Aside from that cut, Windows and Walls is beyond serious criticism, a collection from the Rocky Mountain Mantovani that's mawkish enough to make Dan "Sometimes When We Touch" Hill sound like Bertolt Brecht.

Windows and Walls unearths every hoary singer/songwriter theme without adding any fresh or intriguing perspective whatsoever. You like songs about those one-night stands on the road? Dan's got a doozy: "Sweet Magnolia (and the Travelling Salesman)." "Magnolia, now I see," he sings, "that freedom isn't free." What about songs about this planet of ours, and how we're all going to die if we don't act more responsibly? Windows and Walls offers "Gone Too Far," where, atop an ersatz rock & roll guitar, Fogelberg wonders whether we're "just wishing on a dying star." And, gee whiz, ain't it a shame about those old people who live all by themselves? There's "Windows and Walls," a hammy ode to old age.

Even so, some of you will plunge into the Southwest demimonde with "Tucson, Arizona (Gazette)," a saga of doomed lovers rendered so simple-mindedly that even the late Harry Chapin would have howled at it. Tony has a broken home, a '60 Chevy ("the only true amigo that he's got") and some cocaine. Mary has a bad job and an urge for a good time. Mary dies that night; Tony apparently takes two weeks to expire. "The papers simply stated/It must have been the drugs that drove him mad," posits Dan, but I prefer to think it was Fogelberg's treacly arrangement that dunnit: the bogus flamenco guitar, the violins, the castanets. Especially the castanets. (RS 418)

CHRISTOPHER CONNELLY