Kim Richey has an uncanny knack for making her craft look impossibly easy. How else to explain a woman who picked up a successful songwriting career in Nashville almost on a whim, stuffs her albums with instantly memorable gems and enjoys free creative reign from a major label despite having never had a gold record of her own?|

To her credit, Richey doesn't try to explain her charmed life; she just accepts it. "I'm very fortunate to be where I am," she admits freely. "It's pretty amazing that I've had two records that did well critically, but they didn't truly sell that many of them, and then the head guy says, 'Okay, we didn't sell a whole lot, but they got good reviews so go make another record.'" She looks a little baffled and laughs, "That doesn't happen so often."

Nor is it often that a major label encourages an artist to scrap her established sound and find the one she really wants. After penning hits and album tracks for mainstream country acts (including a No. 1 single, "Believe Me Baby (I Lied)" for Trisha Yearwood) and recording two acclaimed roots-pop albums on her own (1995's Kim Richey and 1997's Bitter Sweet), Richey has finally hit upon a sound she feels truly comfortable with. Granted, from the get-go, the country thing was a lark: Richey headed to Nashville in 1988, moved enough by a Steve Earle tape a friend sent her to put her environmental education career on hold and try her hand at songwriting. She adapted her style to fit her new surroundings, but the Ohio-born singer was raised on Top 40 radio and 45s from her aunt's record store, not Hank Williams. Inside was an XTC fanatic dying to express her true colors: the result is the rich pop soundscape of Glimmer.

"This is the record that I feel sounds most like me naturally," says Richey, who singled out Hugh Padgham to produce because of his work with XTC and the Police. "I'm a big XTC fan -- we would cover 'Love on a Farmboy's Wages' at our country gigs. The cool thing was, [Mercury] left it up to me to make the decision which way I was going to go." One exec at the label told her, "If you don't make a record with Hugh Padgham, you're insane, and if you don't find a way to do it in London, you're really nuts."

Track for track, Glimmer is of a class with Lucinda Williams' acclaimed Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, although aside from the uniform excellence of the songwriting, the two albums could not sound more different. Where the production and performances on Lucinda's album were geared to throw light on its jagged edges, Glimmer comes wrapped in a soft, thick blanket of sound reminiscent of Sarah McLachlan, albeit without the whiff of potpourri and Chamomile tea. At times, particularly on the wrenching but dreamy "Keep Me," the atmosphere becomes so lush as to suggest shades of Enya.

"That's probably because I've got all those vocals on there," says Richey. "I did the background vocal arrangements. Next life, I'm coming back as just a harmony singer, because I love that more than singing lead. I play guitar okay, but I don't play like guitar players play, with all those great melodies that weave in and out of songs. But I hear a lot of those melodies, and they come through when I'm doing the background vocals."

When all's said and done, Glimmer is certain to be a pivotal record in Richey's career. A soaring pop track like "The Way It Never Was" -- or any of several others on the album -- screams for the kind of breakout radio play that made Shawn Colvin a household name two years ago. At the same time, the smooth production might alienate some hard-core fans, though it's hard to imagine any Richey convert finding much fault with the songs themselves.

"People are asking me if I'm worried," she says. "It's really weird, because I have this real odd kind of sense of calm about the whole thing right now. I don't know what that is. But I'm really happy with the record. I don't feel for once that I'm trying to do something that I'm not naturally, so whatever happens with this, I feel pretty good about it because I have the record to show for it, and I'm just going to go out there and play and enjoy it. Maybe it's the calm before the storm or something, but it feels really kind of okay right now."

She pauses. "It's hard to write songs when you're in that zone, though."

RICHARD SKANSE(June 29, 1999)