What strikes me about Livingston Taylor's second album, Liv, is that it almost perfectly illustrates the essential, sublime cruelty inherent in a life that can express hard, brittle pain and cautious, spring-flowering joy with equal fever. The plight of moodiness is one with which almost anyone can identify, and moodiness is what's going on in Livingston's music.

The opening cut, "Get Out of Bed," is a song whose slow, dolorous beginning belies the rollicking, Carolina-bred, Taylor-style funk that it becomes. The lyrics announce that something is always changing for everybody, especially the singer who is singing to himself all the time, and that the world out there is "mostly green with bits of blue," which is pretty optimistic for 1972, but then again poets have always been allowed a little license and anyway, it all depends where you're coming from in the first place.

"Open Up Your Eyes" starts with a beautiful, short flute intro by Dave Woodford, and turns into a jazzy declarative love song. Like most of Livingston's tunes, the lyrical situation is one of unresolved confusion, which is one way of putting across the message that unresolved confusion is where many of us are coming from in the first place.

"Easy Prey" is also a lovely and real sad number, featuring finely muted electric guitar work by Tommy Talton, who previously distinguished himself with brilliant but subtle music on Liv's first record. And Liv himself gets pretty heavy in the last verse: "And the Jesus is hidden away/And the God he won't give me a hand/And the devil sits and waits knowing I'll come around/And for sure I'm easy prey."

"Be That Way" opens side two, and is this album's natural single, whose lyrics imply a plea for something on which a life can bring itself to focus. Like the inner turmoil of John Lennon, Liv's is a little more palatable when it is uptempo. "Truck Driving Man" is a nice vehicle for some of Liv's hot vocal picking, complemented expertly by Paul Hornsby's piano chording and drummer Bill Stewart's always tasteful, pulsing cymbal rhythms.

"Mom, Dad" is about a kid who feels like dog dung on Second Avenue. Strong personal winds blowing here. Boy says so long to ma and pa, boy splits for the city, boy becomes just another wretch with a guitar. "On Broadway" is an excellent, soulful cover of the monumental Mann/Weil/Lieber/Stoller classic, but coming as it does after "Mom, Dad"–well, what we have here is a sequel, folks.

Up until this point, nothing on this record has matched the clever beauty of the melody line of "Carolina Day," from the first album. The next song, "Caroline," comes close. It's about Liv's mental hospital days in the same "zoo" in which brother James (a balladeer of some repute) did a stretch. The album ends on the same dolefúlly positive note on which it began, more angst from a troubled spirit on the move. "I can't be lonesome no more," Liv wails with conviction..

So what we have is a good, solid effort from a cat who comes right out and tells us that he's still looking for a place for himself in his own mind. The album was ably produced by Jon Landau. No complaints, except that Liv occasionally sounds as though he's straining for a sonorous tone, when what his voice actually wants to do is get down on the ground and yowl a little. Keep it comin' Liv, I'm already waiting for the next one. (RS 99)

STEPHEN DAVIS