Radney Foster – Are You Ready for the Big Show

Recorded live at the Continental Club in Austin last year, Are You Ready For the Big Show is Radney Foster’s fourth album since the dissolution of Foster & Lloyd back in 1991, and it’s a good move for him. While Foster has always been the consummate country/pop songwriter — literate, melodic, daring, emotional — he’s also often been a tad too slick in the studio.

On Big Show, Foster rounds up some fine musicians, including Nickel Creek mandolinist Chris Thile, Thompson Brothers percussionist Matt Thompson, and several former bandmates from Foster & Lloyd; cherry-picks the best songs from his solo career while adding a few new ones; and lets fly.

Though Foster is best at the weepy, heartbreak ballad (especially on his 1999 pop breakthrough See What You Want To See), here he shifts effortlessly to a kind of erudite honky-tonk singer, always trying to outsmart the next heartache while displaying a fine grasp for historical themes and imagistic, storytelling songs. “Went For A Ride”, a story-song about a former slave who becomes an award-winning trickshooter (only to end his working life as a Pullman porter), is the centerpiece here, and its tale serves as an intricate metaphor emblematic of many of Foster’s songwriting preoccupations: that things are not always what they seem.

Not everything is so earnest. The self-deprecating, slide-guitar-tinged “Just Call Me Lonesome”, the power-poppish “Tonight”, and the emotionally resigned “Nobody Wins”, its insinuating riff reminiscent of the Beatles “Here Comes The Sun”, all will beckon repeat plays.