Nothin' But the Taillights  (Audio CD) 
by Clint Black

When Clint Black neared the end of his 1995 tour, he realized he had been on the album-tour-album-tour treadmill for seven years without a break. Even Black had to realize that he risked repeating himself and losing the freshness that distinguished his 1989 debut. To his credit, he was smart enough to shut it down for a while--he stayed home for two years and recharged his batteries. Nothin' But the Taillights, released in 1997, is not, despite the wishes of many of us, a return to the hardcore honky-tonk sound of his first album, but it is a top-notch pop-country recording and represents Black's best work since 1992's The Hard Way.

The most obvious key to that achievement is Black's willingness to reach beyond his own insular camp to collaborate with other country-music talents. The singer and his longtime songwriting partner Hayden Nicholas teamed up on five of the new songs, but Black cowrote the seven other songs with new folks, who have injected some new juice into the Black formula. When he wanted to write a sequel to "Cadillac Jack Favor," his real-life saga of a rodeo champion serving time and trying to preserve a marriage while imprisoned on a homicide charge, Black knew he'd need both a woman's perspective and a outsider's viewpoint. Matraca Berg of "Strawberry Wine" fame provided the former, and Marty Stuart, a member in good standing of country-music's outlaw wing, supplied the latter. The resulting bittersweet ballad included both the male and female angles on the story, so it made sense to do it as a duet with labelmate Martina McBride. That song gets the full pop-country treatment, but the singer proves he can also thrive in a stripped-down bluegrass arrangement when he joins Alison Krauss & Union Station on "Our Kind of Love." While he was camped out at home, Black spent a lot of time wood-shedding on the guitar, and he shows off the results by playing a lot of electric guitar as well as acoustic on the new album. No one would mistake Black for Chet Atkins, Steve Wariner, Larry Carlton, Dann Huff, Hayden Nicholas, or Mark Knopfler, but he has improved sufficiently to hold his own with those six gentlemen as they all take guitar solos on "Ode to Chet," a tongue-in-cheek song about learning guitar to impress a young woman.

Nothin' But the Taillights isn't a perfect album, with two tracks lapsing into maudlin schlock that tempts Black into over-singing. Nonetheless, the singer seems reinvigorated by his layoff, his new partnerships, and his new guitar chops even as he's hung on to the best qualities of his early career. --Geoffrey Himes