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If the new troubadours talk about their music with a high but easy seriousness, the tunes themselves have a driving dynamic that needs only a chorus to shake off any lingering academic taint. Massey, 22, has himself a real sit-up-and-take-notice debut, Will T. Massey (MCA), in which the restless soul of Hank Williams matches up effortlessly with a rock-'n'-roll heart. Co- produced by Roy Bittan, the piano wizard from Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band, the record thumb-trips across a desert of burned-out hopes. "There's a coffin curse assailing me/ There's a highway hearse tailing me," Massey sings in one of the album's standout cuts, nailing in two fleet lines a spooky vision that owes a little to the Boss and a lot to the likes of Woody Guthrie and Sherwood Anderson.
The lyrics are the showpieces for the new troubadours. Thompson has heavy chops as an instrumentalist; the others, in varying degrees, just use their guitars as a way to put the song across. McMurtry, 29, even has a little trouble keeping his voice in gear, but it does not greatly matter. His acerbic yet compassionate chronicles of life on the thin edge, where country folk move to the fringes of the big city and start to fall apart like so many patches in a crazy quilt, owe a spiritual debt to the work of his novelist father Larry. James, who is based in Austin, has a terrific second album, Candyland (Columbia), likely to be released by the end of the year, but he warns that he has "about used up all my old scrap pile. You get tired of writing about the same place and you have to move on." After deciding to get serious about songwriting, he almost pulled up stakes and moved on to Nashville a few years back. But his father, working on a screenplay with John Cougar Mellencamp, got his collaborator to play James' demo tape. Mellencamp offered to produce his debut album, and McMurtry, and his roots, stayed put, where they could be nurtured.
There is a certain kind of open emotion required for all music of this kind, which can clash with the macho posturings required of most male pop stars. That could be why the singer-songwriter torch has been borne lately most noticeably by women -- Rickie Lee Jones, Bonnie Raitt, Toni Childs, Tracy Chapman -- who according to show-biz cliche are usually expected to wear their hearts on their guitars.
If this group of troubadours is confounding such stereotypes, it is also playing into some expectations. Whitley has a photogenic scruffiness and a life story that makes him sound the prototypical ramblin' man, '90s style. "My parents were kind of . . . bohemian isn't the right word," he says. "But it was the '60s, they were into acid and getting stoned." His father was a mechanic who became a Madison Avenue art director; his mother was a sculptor who took the kids to Mexico, then finally roosted in a Vermont hunting cabin "with wood heat, no hot water and an outhouse." Whitley himself spent much of the '80s in Belgium. Sounds like material enough for half a dozen records right there.