Dream girl

It's probably useless at this point to complain that country music has abandoned its rural roots. Country has been in the process of slicking itself up for the last 30 years. That it's now more popular than ever is simply a fulfillment of where the mainstream of the music has long been heading. Mainstream country music is now an adjunct to adult contemporary pop (suburban adult contemporary?), albeit with country's constant subtext of the compromises people make in order to go on living. And if too much of the direct access to emotion that's always distinguished country is buried under anonymous, interchangeable arrangements, rote musicianship, and formulaic songwriting, there are still singers so unembarrassed in their approach that their gift is a large, unsubtle, sometimes overwhelming emotional satisfaction. I hope we never lose the performers who can still plug into the original spirit of the music. But we'd better start cherishing the ones who can bring something real to the hit factory Nashville has become.

For an album that trades in vulnerability, Girl of Your Dreams is astonishingly confident. On the cover, Cryner, dressed in elbow-length gloves and an evening gown that wouldn't look out of place on Rita Hayworth, levels a look at the camera that says, "I'm ready for success." It couldn't be more different from her homonymous 1993 debut, where she wore a denim work shirt and velvet broomstick skirt on the cover, and which had a rough-edged, honky-tonk sound (favorite line: "Give him an inch and he thinks he's a ruler"). Cryner's life around that time was reported to be pretty rough (she had to deal with a divorce and her own alcoholism). The serious grab for stardom she's making here seems not only her desire (she says in the liner notes that she thinks MCA stands for "My Chariot Awaits") but an attempt to quell any uneasiness the Nashville establishment may have about her.

Producers Barry Beckett and Tony Brown eschew Bobbie Cryner's roughness and head for the ballads. You could complain that's typical of how the country mainstream douses the spark of its feistiest performers, but the smarts of their move is that Cryner was meant to sing ballads. Her singing (and her writing) is direct, unfussy, but there's an ache in that voice so palpable that I haven't yet been able to make it through dry-eyed.

When most pop performers set out to do love songs about married life, what we hear are cushy paeans to domestic bliss. Girl of Your Dreams may be the most convincing set of married-love songs ever. Cryner does it by singing about the simmering annoyances, compromises, and disappointments of marriage -- and damned if she doesn't make it sound like a good deal. If Richard and Linda Thompson's Shoot Out the Lights is the sound of a marriage falling apart, Girl of Your Dreams is a set of cautionary tales that suggest how marriages last.

Most of these songs don't have happy endings. The title track is a variation on the stock melodramatic device of the wife who comes across an unexpected love note to her husband. The twist is that it's an old love note she sent him years before. As she reads it now, the initial excitement of their romance dances before her like a paradise from which she's been exiled. "You'd Think He'd Know Me Better" starts out as a woman's complaint about a husband who no longer communicates with her. Cryner sucks us right into this woman's anger and then pulls the rug from under us by making us realize the marriage has become a dual freeze-out.

But throughout the album, Cryner lingers over each finely observed domestic detail as if she were weighing what it would cost her to lose it forever. And as it becomes clear what she will lose, you want her to stop, go back, see whether there isn't some way to work things out. The message isn't the conservative one of preserving a marriage at any cost. It's the harder one of toughing out the answer to what will make you happy. It's Cryner's slyest -- and most emotionally convincing -- move to use heartbreak as seduction, as she does on the closing track, "Just Say So." On the surface it's a pledge of devotion to your partner no matter what ("If you want me tonight, just say so"). Listen closer and it's a quiet declaration of will, a demand that lines of communication be kept open, a statement of faith that things can be all right if they do, and a refusal to stay in a marriage where they've shut down. Cryner is telling the man to weigh the options she's been weighing throughout the album and to choose carefully: the girl of his dreams could be the one who's been sleeping beside him for years.