Frets And Flourishes

By RICHARD CORLISS

PERFORMER: SHAWN COLVIN

ALBUM: FAT CITY

LABEL: COLUMBIA

THE BOTTOM LINE: An urban folkie gets straight to the heart with poignant ballads of remorse and resilience.

ONE NICE THING ABOUT FEMALE singer-songwriters is that they don't have to pretend to be guys. Guy singers do. Dead scared of being tagged sensitive, they get muscle-bound in machismo; it cramps their style and muddies their palette. But Annie Lennox or Bonnie Raitt or Mary-Chapin Carpenter can find shading in passion, a smile in sorrow. Especially in sorrow. For these artists, love is a thing felt most deeply when it's lost. So their songs are mostly past tense: the awful stuff that happened to them, the brave face they can put on it. They must be survivors, because they sure can sing about what death feels like. They were there; they're still here.

With her second album, Fat City, Shawn Colvin earns entry into this august group. For a start, she has a gorgeous voice that ranges from the jazz phrasing of Anita O'Day to the girlish soprano of primal folkie Carolyn Hester. Like her idol Joni Mitchell, whose husband Larry Klein produced the album, Colvin paints delicate word landscapes of analysand wonderlands. Like Carpenter, who sings backup on the anthemic Climb On (A Back That's Strong), Colvin, 32, has paid beaucoup dues, working the Manhattan folk scene for more than a decade, in between gigs singing jingles and touring in Pump Boys and Dinettes. With Fat City she needn't worry about paying the rent. Its 11 songs are strong, tuneful, as hard to shake off as a wraith's visitation or a first love.

But Colvin will worry; it's what she does for a living. It makes Fat City a set mostly of frets and flourishes. Even the perkiest number, the irresistibly Beatleesque Round of Blues, hedges its best hopes ("I see lights in a fat city/ I feel love again") by wondering if this buoyancy heralds "a new breakthrough" or "an old breakdown." And in the soft, scary Monopoly, about a departed lover, Colvin flays herself: "I'd rather do anything/ Than write this song for you." She warns herself not to soften the blow with irony: "Retreating behind these lines/ The same old tongue in cheek/ Regretting that both are mine." She swells into Faustian rage ("Imagine the nerve of God/ Letting me let you in") before sinking with the admission that "I would be anywhere/ Than here without you." This is bitter poetry: passion recollected in futility.

And then, at the end, she delivers a direct hit to the heart. Colvin has already shown us how much she knows, so the naked sentiment of I Don't Know Why startles: "I don't know why/ The sky is so blue/ And I don't know why/ I'm so in love with you." The tune's long notes suggest a cathedral dirge, but in the purity of Colvin's voice you'll hear an affirmation of hope against reason, a declaration of faith in the unknown. It is the boldness of a heart that has lived in dark places and is tougher for the journey. And now it's in fat city, to stay.