Joan Baez has never before recorded a song quite like "Stones in the Road," Mary-Chapin Carpenter's bluntly cynical assessment of the yuppie generation. The rolling folk-rock ballad describes how people who were brought up as kids to feel guilty about starving children in other countries ended up selfish materialists ashamed to make contact with the homeless whom they pass on the street. The lyric also suggests that the traumatic assassinations of the Sixties have left the members of this generation morally numb, as they climb the corporate ladder and chisel extra dollars on their expense accounts.

As sung by Baez, one of the most righteous social crusaders of the Sixties and Seventies, "Stones in the Road" assumes intriguing resonances. The fifty-two-year-old singer sounds as though she is both criticizing the generation that followed her and identifying with it.

Carpenter's anthem is the high point of Play Me Backwards, Baez's first album for a major label since the late Seventies and her best record since her 1972 album Come From the Shadows. Like that album, Play Me Backwards was made in Nashville, a musical capital that has always brought out Baez's salt-of-the-earth side. Baez wrote several of the cuts with her producers Wally Wilson and Kenny Greenberg whose twangy folk-country settings complement the most relaxed singing of her career. Among the other writers represented are John Hiatt ("Through Your Hands") and, most notably, Janis Ian, who co-wrote the album's second-best cut, the wistfully sexy "Amsterdam," with Buddy Mondlock.

Even though the material on Play Me Backwards is not all top-notch, Baez's singing has reached new levels of mature expressiveness. The texture of her voice may have darkened, but its beauty remains untarnished. (RS 648)

STEPHEN HOLDEN