'Country Is The State I'm In' declares Susan Cattaneo and who would argue with a woman who can sing a line like "When my head hits the pillow, I dream of Amarillo" without any apparent irony.
Cattaneo was raised in New Jersey but is now based in Boston where she teaches songwriting at the Berklee College of Music.
Heaven And Heartache is the follow up to her 2009 debut album, Brave and Wild.
It's a highly commercial collection of twelve country-flavoured pop songs, nine of which were recorded in Nashville with the help of music city's session musicians.
The opening track - Gotta Get Gone - gives the somewhat misleading impression that this is going to be a selection of sassy tunes celebrating independent womanhood.
The song tells of a woman making an escape from her old life under the cover of darkness : "Gotta get gone like a girl who is finding the woman she's been waiting to be".
None of the other tracks are quite so assertive or as openly rebellious as this one.
Girls Night Out is also about women finding space away from men but is a humorous sing-a-along tune rather than a statement of feminist values.
Rather than dealing with the gritty reality of modern love, Cattaneo prefers to highlight a mood of dreamy romance to the point of being overly sentimental.
In Fall To Fly, for example, she sings "Like fallen snow at dawn you move me/And with you by my side/We'll soar, we will climb straight to the heaven's skies. Baby We Fly continues the metaphor of flight as a symbol of freedom.
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When her head (and heart) is not in the clouds she addresses problematic relationships in a light-hearted or undramatic manner. On Again Off Again is the humourous tale of a topsy-turvy relationship in which she sings a duet with fellow-Bostonian Ellis Paul. Put That Bottle Down touches on the problem of living with a hard-drinking man with a very light touch.
A yearning for good old-fashioned country comforts is the theme of Little Big Sky in which "life makes more sense when the blacktop disappears" and nostalgia for simple pleasures also figures prominently on Watching The Sparks Fly , set against the backdrop of 4th July celebrations.
The album title comes from a line in the best song on the album - Just Like Texas; a love story of briefly throwing caution to the wind with a fast living man.
Susan Cattaneo reminds me of Mary Chapin Carpenter both in terms of the fondness for wistful nostalgia and for the 'shut and kiss me' style sentiment of the whimsical Shave.
All things considered, there are some pleasant easy listening songs here but nothing that feels raw and rootsy enough to make a lasting impact.
Susan Cattaneo's Website
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