Fat City

SHAWN COLVIN

(Columbia)

A half decade before Shawn Colvin scored her commercial breakout with A Few Small Repairs, she charmed, dazzled and seduced me with her sophomore effort, Fat City. Her voice is pure and crystalline, balancing power, ease and vulnerability. The elegant production always puts her singing front and center, allowing her to intimately express her eloquent observations on life and love. This is exceedingly pretty pop music, but with bite. The album-closing ballad, "I Don't Know Why," should raise a tear. Shawn Colvin's singing on this album made me fall in love with her for a while.

This article appears in Feb 13-19, 2008.

Eric Snider is the dean of Bay area music critics. He started in the early 1980s as one of the founding members of Music magazine, a free bi-monthly. He was the pop music critic for the then-St. Petersburg...