Once In a Very Blue Moon

Notable for her meditations on relationships, the ties that bind families (“Mary and Omie”), and the journeys that threaten to break lives apart (“I’m Not Driving This Wheel”), Nanci Griffith continued to stretch the boundaries of folk narrative with her third album. Musically, the arrangements are perfectly in keeping with her previous acoustic orchestrations–Griffith’s records may seem spare, although the layers of cello, mandolins, and Dobros add signature texture–but lyrically she pushes beyond easy melancholy and into the weightier subject of love’s struggle against time and distance. –Roy Kasten