Best Betts

9/25/2007 Stephen L. Betts Rascal Flatts Still Feels Good Lyric Street Fans of last year’s top-selling act in any musical genre don’t have a thing to worry about with the release of this boundary-busting album, except perhaps feeling somewhat manipulated. They’ll no doubt follow the group’s edict to “Bob That Head,” and they’ll be swooning to the swirling harmonies of the title track. Even the hardest-hearted will, to borrow the band’s own phrase, melt as they deliver the one-two punch of a couple of nice R&B-tinged ballads: “Better Now” and “She Goes All the Way,” their collaboration with Oscar-winner/musician Jamie Foxx. And by the time they get to the final track, “It’s Not Supposed to Be That Way,” fans who own firearms may be double-checking the locks on their cabinets. I suppose the group could be inspiring less responsible behavior. Steve Earle Washington Square Serenade New West “Goodbye Guitar Town,” Steve Earle says early on in the opening track of his latest album. And, if you know anything about Steve Earle, you know he means it. Forsaking Music City for his new home in the Big Apple, and accompanied, in life and on record, by wife Allison Moorer, the hardcore troubadour crafts a disc that’s heavier on drum machines and studio effects than anything he’s ever done. Yet he never lets you forget that he’s still a top-notch storyteller steeped in the folk tradition. Best example of that is “City of Immigrants,” though it’s hardly the only highlight the record has offer. He may be a long way, stylistically and geographically, from his 1986 Guitar Town days, but Steve Earle remains a fierce, courageous poet of the common man, just like his new neighbor, a Jersey boy named Springsteen.