I wish I'd written every one," Townes Van Zandt says of the 15 songs he covers on this deceptively informal, frequently intense album, assembled from live shows recorded "over a number of years in joints all over America." Remarkably, when Van Zandt wraps his textured, road-grained voice around these songs, they do sound like he wrote them. The actual authors include Bob Dylan, Lightnin' Hopkins, Joe Ely, the Carter Family and Bruce Springsteen.

Van Zandt is best known as a songwriter with an impressive command of both the telling image and the tall tale. His own tunes have been covered by artists ranging from vets like Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard to young bands like the Tindersticks. But it's difficult to get a sense of Van Zandt as an artist from the wildly diverse cover treatments his songs have received. In fact, Van Zandt has always been his own best interpreter. He can sing a high-lonesome country tune and follow it with a densely symbolic narrative ballad. He is possibly the only white singer who can perform rangy country blues like Hopkins' without a hint of artifice; Van Zandt's blues are so casually authentic, the issue of authenticity doesn't even come up. Yet he doesn't come across as an eclectic. Whatever he's singing, there's a singular vision, an indelible individuality. The music is his birthright, as natural as breathing.

The covers on Roadsongs are as susceptible to Van Zandt's singular stamp as are his own tunes. The dust and grit of the singer's Texas upbringing gets into Springsteen's "Racing in the Streets," which Van Zandt transforms into a kind of automotive dust-bowl ballad. Jagger-Richards' "Dead Flowers" and the traditional "Cocaine Blues" sound less like rock and folk evergreens than like dispatches from an ongoing struggle with personal demons. Little Willie the Gambler" and "Man Gave Names to All the Animals' seem to be included not because they're Bob Dylan songs but because they mean something to Van Zandt. And the four Hopkins selections are a sheer delight – not "white blues," not "folk blues," just good music.

And, it should be noted, this unpretentious gem was originally released in Europe – before Dylan's recent forays into cover-tune albums.

Roadsongs is available from Sugar Hill Records, P.O. Box 55300, Durham, NC 27717-5300. (RS 685)

ROBERT PALMER