Shawn Colvin - These Four Walls

Shawn Colvin is another one of those artists who has the saddest, sweetest voice. When she starts to sing, "Fill me up, cause you're all that I've got and I traveled a long long way," you just feel it in your gut. Her latest album, These Four Walls is full of more of those great heartbreaking tunes.

There's no good place to start in describing the haunting, heartaching aspects of These Four Walls. The album unlike much of Colvin's previous work. After all, she's got a fierce niche carved for herself in the area of sad navel-gazing contemporary folk music.

These Four Walls is absolutely teeming with musical gems like the album's opener, the sonically upbeat "Fill Me Up." It's the same old lonely lyrics, but with a skip-down-the-street quality to them. A couple of songs later, she moves on to just plain groveling on "Venetian Blue," with lines like, "Where did you come from, how could you leave, and why can't you be mine?"

From there, she moves on to "The Bird," which is a more liberating heartbreak tune. In it, Colvin sings a more transcendant melody and a hook that ends with, "What I like about the bird is she don't need nothing but sky."

The bottom line is that Colvin just writes good songs. As a matter of fact, her songs are so good that it's hard to get through the whole album without feeling inspired to go write a great one yourself. It's been a while since Shawn Colvin released a record, and it was well worth the wait.