When Radney Foster's third solo album, See What You Want to See, finally hit stores this week, you can bet he exhaled one of the biggest sighs of relief in his career, if not his life.

Promotional copies of the album were mailed out over a year ago. Last summer, his record label, Arista Austin, flew him to New York to meet the press. A reintroduction was in order: Foster, one half of the successful late Eighties/early Nineties country duo Foster & Lloyd, had gone on to release two well-received solo albums and then dropped out of sight for five years. The lead single from See What You Want to See, a pop gem called "I'm In" (a duet with label-mate Abra Moore), proved that he was not returning as a country artist. He was starting over, and the initial reviews were encouraging. Then, two weeks before the release date, the label began undergoing restructuring and the album was put on hold.

"It's like, everything that you make your living off of gets pushed back," groans Foster. "But I was so used to not making money at that point, I was like, 'Okay, we'll just amble along a little further, carry the debt a little further.'" Eventually, Arista lured him back with an offer he couldn't refuse. "They said, 'We want to present something to you as if we were just buying this outright, as if you were shopping it to us.' And they just blew me away with their marketing plan. I basically turned to my manager and said, 'You just can't buy this kind of loyalty.'"

Searching for a silver lining to the whole ordeal, Foster says that the delay in the album's release has given him time to grow more comfortable performing the intensely close-to-home new material without breaking down like a "blubbering idiot."

"I know it always sounds like a cliche, but this is truly the most personal record I've ever written," says Foster. "While going through a divorce, and the hiatus I took for all the family stuff going on that I really needed to take care of, my give-a-shit meter went to nothing. And in a lot of ways it changed my songwriting, because before, I wrote a lot of personal material, but I would always try to veil it so there was enough ambiguity to keep it from being really close to the bone. But with this one, it was ... I don't care. The songs were written really as a catharsis through all that time period."

Having said that, the now happily re-married Foster deflates the notion that this is his D-I-V-O-R-C-E album. "You know the funny thing is, it doesn't feel that way," he says. "'I've Got a Picture' deals with divorce, and yet, 'Angry Heart' deals with falling in love and having the healing aspect of a new relationship. There's always that cliche of like, 'Do you have to go through a pile of crap to be able to write good songs?' And I don't know if that's necessarily so. I think its transition. Usually some big emotional event triggers something in you that makes you want to write, be it a really happy thing like the birth of a child or a horrible thing like the death of a parent or child or breaking up. I think mining that material is what makes a good song."

Now, Foster is ready to mine AAA and alternative radio waves with his new songs and tackle them on the road with his own power trio. "Once I started writing the songs, they weren't fitting lyrically or stylistically into the tight neat little package that is now called country radio," he says. "I took a big step to the left, and the country radio industry took a big step to the right. And so I found myself further away from it, and I said well, if these songs are rock and pop songs, then let me go mine more of that. It was like, if that's where I'm going, go do that -- don't do it half way."

Foster's still got his finger stuck in the Nashville songwriting pie, however. He currently has a Top 10 country radio hit with his song "Anyone Else," covered by Collin Raye. Better yet is his song "Never Say Die," which is sitting snuggly in the middle of the Dixie Chick's six-million selling Wide Open Spaces.

"That's a lot of dough," laughs Foster. "Anytime something sells five or six million copies ... it's a good problem to have. So, things are looking up."

RICHARD SKANSE
(May 19, 1999)