Search - Christine Lavin :: Please Don't Make Me Too Happy

On the up side, Christine Lavin's eighth album, Please Don't Make Me Too Happy, includes three hilarious stand-up monologues thinly disguised as folksongs. "Oh No" resembles a Lucille Ball routine where the comedienne can't find her glasses, her purse, or her phone book. "Waiting for the B Train" is a slice-of-life, absurdist narrative from the New York subway system, and the album's title track is a wonderfully exaggerated worry-fest about growing too contented to write meaningful folksongs. On the down side, the album's other nine songs are eye-glazingly earnest. On "Jane," she turns a reunion with a long-lost friend into a smug, humorless put-down of housewives everywhere. On "The Sixth Floor," a song about the Kennedy Museum in Dallas, Lavin manages to make the most controversial historical event of her lifetime deadly dull. Several numbers about the single life wallow in self-pity. And teaming up with musicians who have played with the Band, Nanci Griffith, Bryan Adams, the Max Weinberg Seven, and the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra doesn't flesh out Lavin's notoriously thin music so much as it exposes just how limited a singer she is. --Geoffrey Himes