Like a message in a bottle, 'Stages: The Lost Album' surfaces from nearly twenty years' oblivion. It recovers a lost folk treasure – Eric Andersen's follow-up to his classic Blue River, from 1972 – and recalls an earlier age when the art of songwriting really mattered. A veteran of the early-Sixties Greenwich Village/Cambridge folk wave, Andersen wrote songs like "Thirsty Boots" and "Violets of Dawn" that were covered by Judy Collins, the Band, Janis Joplin, Pete Seeger and others. Yet he found commercial success only with Blue River. Stages, produced in Nashville by Norbert Putnam, featured such notable guest performers as Joan Baez and Leon Russell, but the irreplaceable master tapes mysteriously vanished and with them the momentum of Andersen's career.

Finally found sixteen years later, Stages, with its nine original tracks remixed and remastered by Putnam, is a pivotal album. It spotlights Blue River's personal, philosophical concerns with an emotional immediacy that's bathed in keening steel guitar. Descended from Scandinavian sailors, Andersen navigates the inner world's treacherous straits of elusive love and rushing time. With a blend of introspection, isolation and sentiment, he explores the tensions between desire and attainment, the yearning for an impossible union of the ideal and the real. Sung in his resonant baritone, Andersen's best work remains his bittersweet ballads: Their simplicity and vulnerability convey painful truths with a world-weary edge and grace. Three tracks – "Woman, She Was Gentle," "Time Run Like a Freight Train" and "Be True to You" – especially stand out. "It's Been a Long Time," inspired by his friendship with Joni Mitchell, longs for their shared past and questions the power of dreams and song to capture internal truth.

In keeping with Andersen's original concept of Stages as "a connecting point," another vintage track and three new songs have been added, with guest appearances by Shawn Colvin, Willie Nile, Hooter Eric Bazilian and the Band's Rick Danko and Garth Hudson. Both "Make It Last (Angel in the Wind)," a celebration of home and permanent love, and "Soul of My Song" reflect the moving maturity and redemption of Andersen's splendid 1988 album Ghosts Upon the Road. Stages: The Lost Album ultimately brings home the message that amid the transience of life and desire, you may still be able to find what you're looking for, to get what you need. (RS 606)

JANIE MATTHEWS