This major-label debut album by musical experimentalist Robin Holcomb is smart, lovely and ambitious. Holcomb works the same turf as Suzanne Vega, Joni Mitchell and Rickie Lee Jones but seeds this literate, sophisticated pop terrain with her own sharp lyricism. A wordsmith riveted by life's momentary and private revelations, she is a wise and worldly mystic in the vein of Emily Dickinson, and her...

Robin Holcomb is a shy suburban mom who worked as a sharecropper in North Carolina and a cutting-edge composer in downtown Manhattan. On her second album of songs, Rockabye, Holcomb steps further into an eerie landscape that is both deeply traditional and avant-garde.

Holcomb's first album with vocals (Robin Holcomb, 1990) – she previously recorded two instrumental albums – initially...