The tender art of pop introspection came of age in the 1970s. A sensitive breed dubbed the ``American singer-songwriter`` began crafting some of the most disarmingly personal music ever to hit record grooves and radio waves.
With the obsession of Bob Dylan, but the melancholy of Dylan Thomas, many FM poets sang in doomed pursuit of happiness-sexual, emotional, social. Their political and ecological cries didn`t surface until the `80s.
Most of these singer-songwriters were rooted in Los Angeles, city of the fallen angels. Joni Mitchell sang sweet and high on the tortures of longing and love. A sincere Jackson Browne got self-conscious about commitment and the end of the world.
Deceptively ironic, Randy Newman upended American trends, while Warren Zevon hung pretense out to dry. With childlike recklessness, Rickie Lee Jones drowned in the romance of sidewalk life.
Back on the East Coast, Paul Simon, minus flowery Garfunkel, mourned the inevitability of age and distance. Carole King had homespun heartaches. Carly Simon found clouds in her coffee. And James Taylor waxed pastoral about mental escape.
Who are today`s young singer-songwriters? Who are the voices shaping bittersweet songs out of depression, heartbreak, hope and fear? While Mitchell and Browne intellectually grapple with world concepts in their elder statehood, whose hearts and minds are bleeding?
Three of the strongest young FM poets are riding new albums: The Indigo Girls, Tracy Chapman and James McMurtry.
The Indigo Girls, ubiquitous on local summer concert schedules, have just issued their fifth release, the spiritually vigilant ``Rites of Passage.``
Socially conscious Chapman, still in the shadow of her acclaimed 1988 Grammy-winning debut, is touring to support her third album, ``Matters of the Heart.``
McMurtry`s second, ``Candyland,`` picks up on the desolate themes of 1989`s atmospheric ``Too Long in the Wasteland.``
Like their `70s ancestors, these musicians are heavily influenced by folk music. With unsynthesized, acoustic-based instrumentation and a healthy dose of world-weariness, they are nothing if not intimate.
At the same time, unlike folk purists, they use a rock beat, and often an electric jolt. The Indigo Girls have an alternative-rock tint whereby they can feature backup vocals by R.E.M.`s Michael Stipe as naturally as vocals by Jackson Browne, who`s on two ``Rites of Passage`` songs.
McMurtry`s sound bears the raw-boned-rock stamp of his producer, John Mellencamp, especially on ``Candyland,`` a less pensive outing than
``Wasteland.`` It`s nothing new, of course: Early on, this melding earned the newfangled label of folk-rock.
Among singer-songwriters then and now, emotionalism is in high supply. McMurtry, son of author Larry McMurtry, rarely allows his voice to rise out of its somber tone, as he details dead-end lives on the Texas outskirts.
Chapman`s deep, despairing vocals make her voice one of the most moving instruments in today`s pop arsenal. Yearning for self-knowledge and spiritual heights, the Indigo Girls can grab you by the throat with their passionate, on-a-dime harmonies.
In 10 years, the Indigo Girls may deliver with the restraint and nuance-heavy effect of the older Mitchell, whose fine 1991 ``Night Ride Home`` is nonetheless a smoldering coal next to the sweet raging fire of ``Blue`` and
``For the Roses.`` Why rush their mature retreat from vulnerability?
Weighty lyrics go hand-in-hand with the frank demeanor of the singer-songwriter. You won`t find one ``fun`` song on any of these three new albums.
In the `70s, when humor reared its head on albums by Randy Newman, Warren Zevon and Paul Simon, it usually had a knife hidden in its belt. The New Seriousness of the 1980s, which held the pop world hostage to political correctness (``We Are the World`` may have been the apogee), has only contributed to this wellspring of profundity.
Particularly in songs by the Indigo Girls and Chapman, anxieties about the environment, poverty and violence rival private worries and dark confessions. In this sense, the new singer-songwriters are less bourgeois than their predecessors.
The Indigo Girls-Amy Ray and Emily Saliers-are the most writerly of the group. They are wont to toss off dense lines such as ``I`d walk into the fingers of your fire willingly and dance the edge of sanity`` and drop literary allusions to Virginia Woolf.
They are not given to understatement. Like their earlier work, ``Rites of Passage`` is thick with questions of religious faith and insight; the deep consolations of Earth and sky; the plight of ``the masses``; and the
``predator of pain`` known as loneliness.
In writing style, McMurtry is worlds away from the Indigos` ecstatic queries and hopes. His trump card is resignation, and the Americans he profiles can be characterized as closed-minded.
Their world, spiritually and financially mediocre, is unchanging:
``You`ve got your life all figured out/but you still don`t get much sleep.``