For years, I have assumed a personal responsibility to introduce Cynthia's music to as wide an audience as I possibly can, and now that I'm actually sitting down and writing in words why she's important and why everyone needs to hear her, I'm realizing how difficult it is. To say that her songs are unique is true and doesn't begin to do them justice. To say that in a single Cynthia Carle performance I saw an impressive array of hard-boiled Hollywood types reduced to tears of laughter in one song and tears of quite another sort two songs later. Part of her genius is an unfailing ability to make listeners recognize instantly the characters in her songs. What can be a little unsettling is when the character we recognize is oneself. As a songwriter she combines a rare intelligence and an enlightened sentiment, combined with a political eye that could open an oyster at sixty paces and a nearly incomparable knowledge of her way into and around a song. They are the kind of songs that make you wonder why no one has ever written them before. But, trust me, they haven't. Plus, unlike many singer/songwriters, she can sing. Yikes, can she sing.

But with Cynthia Carle, it's always about the song. I know for a fact that she's been churning them out since at least the Reagan Administration, with more coming almost weekly, but like most artists, she's no better at explaining what makes them so remarkable than the rest of us. What makes a song great art is elusive and subjective and to really nail it down requires greater gifts than mine. I'm neither musicologist nor poet and can therefore not hold forth on the musical cadences or interior lyrical forms that I've always suspected are part of her magic. (I'm not even certain there are such things as "interior lyrical forms," but if there are, I'm sure Cynthia utilizes them brilliantly). Comparisons are odious so I won't make them, but this is a woman whose influences run from Townes Van Zandt and Randy Newman to Robert Benchley and Groucho Marx.

But she's nobody's copy. She is not the "new" anyone. Prepare to be dazzled.