Songs of the West

Following departure from Warner Bros., the label saw fit to compile , a collection of previously-released performances linked thematically by their connection, however tenuous, to Western music, life and mythology. Stripped of their original album context, the individual tracks fail to happily co-exist; the record's lone selling point is that a pair of cuts -- one culled from her autobiographical song cycle , the other a cover of -- make their domestic CD bow herein. ~ Jason Ankeny