Chely Wright - Never Love You Enough (2001) Lossless

The title tune that kicks off Chely Wright's fourth album is a typically overwrought country-pop love pledge, but on other tunes Wright cuts masterfully to love's twisted chase with anguished musical vignettes of romantic ambiguity. Women who aren't loved enough ("Jezebel," "Deep Down Low"), women who are loved too much ("Not As in Love"), women who've lost their men ("Her"), and women who want their men to get lost ("While I Was Waiting") are all topics of the day. Yet Wright brings similar emotional authority to a pair of songs--"One Night in Las Vegas" and "For the Long Run"--that celebrate the quiet, hard-fought intimacy of long-term commitment. To describe Wright, who wrote or cowrote 5 of these 12 cuts, as a country diva with a graduate degree in marital counseling is a compliment. For the most part, she delivers these plaints of romantic anguish and (occasional) serenity with conviction and understated grace. -- Bob Allen