Clint Black

In today's brave new Nashville, artists fall into neat categories: the docile crooners, like
Randy Travis and George Strait, who sing pretty and pretty much toe the line; and the hell
raisers, like Steve Earle and John Anderson. But, lucky for us, twenty-seven-year-old Clint
Black doesn't fall into one of the neat categories. Neither choirboy nor hellion, he writes
and sings about battered hearts, broken dreams and tortured emotions with an u... More >

He's got good looks, fondly crafted songs, and a trenchant if anonymous voice, subtle even for Nashville neotraditional. Buoyantly in love on "Straight from the Factory," he quickly follows with as gracious a breakup song as you could hope to hear. Yet though she may have left him "A Better Man," he's not together enough to live without her. So for the rest of the album he spends a lot of time in bars--every one subtly and trenchantly evoked, of course. (Grade: A-)