Unlike her fellow Jersey rebel, Bruce Springsteen, Phoebe Snow connected directly with her audience the first time out. Her debut recording received almost no advertising and publicity, yet it climbed, slowly but inexorably, into the Top Ten. And unlike Patti Smith, the other Jersey-bred new star of the last Jersey-dominated year, Snow made her mark without having to perform for a cult audience. In fact, she hardly performed at all. She dropped from sight after a short tour with Jackson Browne and then, while Columbia fought with Shelter, her first record company, for exclusive rights to her future, she got married, got pregnant, had a baby and wrote most of the original songs on Second Childhood.

Will the record buyers who made Phoebe Snow a gold album, and who presumably liked its descriptions of adolescent insecurity and suburban nightmares, respond with equal enthusiasm to a more mature, less neurotic Phoebe Snow? It's almost as if the two Snows, before and after, were two different people, and the difference is reflected in the music. The first album is spare—just Snow's guitar, rhythm instruments, occasional organ and elegant obbligatos by jazzmen Zoot Sims and Teddy Wilson. Phil Ramone, who engineered the LP and was de facto producer of at least some of it, has pulled out the stops on Second Childhood, giving it a glossy patina, a full complement of session players, strings and brass. Snow's voice, with its remarkable immediacy, liquidity and control, dominated the first album. The second is more of a piece; the voice blends with Pat Williams's orchestrations into a more coherent if less striking whole.

The change is startling, but no less so than the changes in Snow's life, from unhappy suburban hopeful to pop star, bitter adolescent to wife and mother. Predictably, she has been wondering how these extraordinarily rapid transitions are going to affect her creativity—even wondering aloud, in one of the LP's most personal songs. "Inspired Insanity" is a conundrum, asking a new question for every old one it answers. The muse, half-personified, half-idealized as the inspired insanity of the title, is invited to "help yourself to my new clothes/Borrow some of my daydreams, too," to "come visit me." It changes form, from a voice on the telephone to the face in the mirror, and Snow sings sirenlike to lure it back, then shrugs her shoulders and admits, "You ain't talked to me of late/But don't you worry, I can wait again."

Inviting the crazier side of yourself to drop in and disturb your hard-won new normalcy would seem to be a difficult songwriting method at best, but apparently Snow hasn't found a better way to make something positive out of her past and present preoccupations. The most convincing and memorable of her latest batch of love songs is about the vain hope that a moment of ecstasy will last forever: "All over, all over, I hope this will never be all over." "Sweet Disposition" is more optimistic, but it's fluff, with little of the melodic, harmonic and verbal distinctiveness one expects from a Phoebe Snow song. On the other hand, "Isn't It a Shame" tries to take an "adult," once-removed look at the singer's unhappy teenage years in the suburbs, when the dose taken by a desperately alienated boyfriend turned out to be "more than medication/It's all that's on the shelf." The experiences must still be real but the song's so pat it's simply cute: "My casual friends were casualties/My foes were just faux pas" milks painful memories for a belly laugh. "Cash In," which sounds a little like Snow's friend Paul Simon and features the Jessy Dixon Singers, who have worked with him, is obviously about reaching some sort of turning point. But the images are too internalized and too fragmented to add up. The "cash it all in" refrain is reminiscent of William Burroughs's reiterated "show your cards all players" and as subject to almost any interpretation.

"Two-Fisted Love" is Snow at her best, a song that's verbally, emotionally and musically complex, and directly, unblushingly lusty. It is probably older than the others; Snow was singing it on the Jackson Browne tour and it has to do with a time in her life when sexual and drug-induced euphoria were two sides of the same coin. Here, rather than trying to achieve a godlike perspective on events that transpired only a short time ago, she's simply reporting. She reflects on the ambivalence of the feelings she describes in an equally ambivalent set of wonderful musical changes that teeter between country rock and after-hours jazz, and yet the song's elements hang together, because the organizing principle isn't a moral—instead, it's immersion in an experience. The best songs on Phoebe Snow worked similarly. "Harpo's Blues" and "I Don't Want the Night to End". weren't really blinding illuminations of Snow's adolescent anxiety, her former boyfriend's apparent suicide, her determination to transcend the past. But they reported these things in images that were so immediate, and so intimately wedded to the songs' melodic and harmonic twists and turns, that the listener couldn't help feeling his or her own pain and determination.

In this sense, "Two-Fisted Love" is unlike the other songs on the new album, more like those on the first. But the difference, in a nutshell, between the earlier LP's "Poetry Man" and the new "Pre-Dawn Imagination" is the difference between the older and newer songs. The former brought a specific person to life with a few well-chosen words. The latter sketches the same situation—an affair with a married man—and looks back on it with mixed feelings, without investigating the particularities of the people involved.

If Snow has come to grips with the inner workings of her creativity only sporadically, and indulged her love of wordplay as if the new album really were her second childhood, she has also stopped short of her unique vocal potential. She easily sings clear, bell-like tones an octave and a half above her normal range, but it took Paul Simon to get that facet of her talent on record, on the single they made together. There was nothing like that last, triumphant chorus of Simon's "Gone at Last" on Phoebe Snow and there's nothing like it on Second Childhood. Instead, strings, woodwinds and cunning but derivative jazz—by the Brecker Brothers' Dave Sanborn and Don Grolnick rather than Zoot Sims and Teddy Wilson—swirl around and over the voice, smoothing out its rough edges and too frequently vitiating its individuality.

There is vocal grandstanding, but not of the "look-how-high" variety. Snow turns "No Regrets," a tune that became the personal property of the late Billie Holiday, into an uptempo virtuoso exercise. She's so pleased with her melisma on the first "no" that she does it again before going on to "regrets," and in the process she negates the emotional weight of the Lady Day version. Instead of uncovering levels of feeling, she skips blithely through the changes like a bopsinging Pollyanna. Yet her other jazz number, Gershwin's "There's a Boat That's Leavin' Soon for New York," is a gem. The lyric's meaning is nearer the surface—"No Regrets" was relatively lightweight before Holiday appropriated it—and Snow gets inside it, touching that longing for the high life that's in almost everyone while illuminating the chord changes with gorgeous note choices and swinging like a veteran.

If dedication to vocal artistry is what Phoebe Snow is all about, then most of Second Childhood is beyond reproach. The previous LP seemed to promise relevant soulful statements from and to a young suburban generation that hasn't really been heard on records. But maybe it didn't promise any such thing. Maybe it was the voice that seduced us, that tender, sexy, little girl/experienced woman voice that sings rings around voices with ten times the training and experience, and thrills us all the more because even at its most spectacular it sounds unforced and quite innocent of artifice. Maybe we thought we were hearing the voice of a generation when in fact we were hearing a profoundly individual, profoundly musical voice. If that's so, and this reviewer suspects that it is, then Second Childhood is a worthy successor to Phoebe Snow. (RS 210)

ROBERT PALMER