Ever since Joni Mitchell spread her free-verse wings, many a female singer-songwriter has tried to master the introspective idiom only to sink into the swamp of banality or shoot off into some chilly, abstract emotional ozone. But Shawn Colvin stays aloft above her own inner geography by combining a gift for describing fragile, passionate and anxious states of mind with a dense, low, percussive sound that is both rhythmic and muscular. Steady On, her 1989 debut, may have been filled with dead-of-night images of broken china, women in flames and insomnia, but Colvin's thick weave of acoustic, twelve-string and electric guitars bespoke a determination that was anything but ruined.

The followup, Fat City, is a fatter, happier record, the story of joy tenuously found that begins "Please, no more therapy." The problem, of course, with happiness is that it lacks the dark bite of misery, but Colvin's great skill is her ability to convey the ambivalent wonder of meeting happiness as if for the first time. "Polaroids," which opens the album, is a digressive series of snapshotlike images that ends in a dream "of lovers who walked the plank/Out on the edge of time," who then go "overboard." Like Thelma and Louise flying over the Grand Canyon, where exactly they're going is up in the air.

On the exuberant "Tennessee" and "Object of My Affection" or the low-down smolder of "Set the Prairie on Fire," the optimism is matched by a rolling, country-tinged music-scape; elsewhere, as in "Orion in the Sky" or "Round of Blues," folk and bad memories – "all the sad, sad things we've done" – creep back in together. But "I Don't Know Why," the lullaby at the tail end of the record, offers the odd comfort of its title: Despite all the warnings, hope happens. (RS 647)

STACEY D'ERASMO