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Some of America's finest female singer/songwriters are trying to find a place between country music, folk music, and pop where they can make their literary lyrics felt without allowing the music to fall into predictable patterns. A new milestone in this ongoing quest is Patty Larkin's 1997 album, Perishable Fruit. Larkin, who was a Celtic and jazz guitarist before hitting the folk-coffeehouse circuit, steps into the producer's slot for the first time on this, her seventh solo project. To avoid the temptation of repeating herself, she set herself a challenge--she would make the entire album only with voice and stringed instruments, no drums or keyboards. That doesn't mean there's no percussion on the recording, for Larkin invited her favorite musicians into her home studio on Cape Cod and encouraged them to bang on their basses, dulcimers, lap-steel guitars, cellos, e-bow guitars, and mandolins to reinforce the beat. The result is an unusual soundscape where all the percussion arrives with a twang, and where delicate acoustic arpeggios are set against sustained electric-guitar drones. The presence of so many stringed-instrument parts creates a big space, but the absence of keyboard chords and reverberating drums also opens up a lot of room within that space. Larkin takes advantage of this room to sing in a whispery, intimate voice about a woman who feels suffocated by old houses, old stories, old fears, old lovers, old arguments, and old music and wants to hit the road, read a new book, get out of the car, take a deep breath, let go of the mace, and pick up a red accordion. Larkin has a way with words, whether describing the narrow choices imposed by poverty ("You don't say no with an empty belly and a barbed-wire bonnet on a wolf hangin' at your door") or love gone wrong ("I saw you as you drove away, . you checked yourself in the rearview mirror"). But it's her ability to match these words with a new kind of country/folk/pop/chamber music that makes this album so special. When Larkin sings of drowning in commitments and restrictions on "Coming Up for Air," the arrangement has a thick, underwater drowsiness, but when she declares on the chorus she's "coming up for air, rising to a very new somewhere," the melody breaks free and shines like a fish leaping in the sun.

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