If you thought they were bad when they were cute, or even that they were cute when they were good, believe me, you don't want to hear them mature.

These 10 well-culled copyrights, two from the '80s and only four from 2000, are something new and ominous, because they're dull. They smell of equine methane: the old-fart hegemony that fuels alt-country, AC radio, and literary anthologies canonizing Ry Cooder, Ernie K-Doe, and Spooner Oldham.

Lyrics swirl around sensibly and the formidable tunesmithing never goes down the drain.

Occasionally her pushing-30 doubts about the single life are touching, like when she imagines Gavin Rossdale would make a good dad. But after five years, two producers, one Spin cover, and one lead review in Rolling Stone, the single Interscope sent her back to the salt mines for is the best thing on her automatic-platinum follow-up.

The main problem with this background tour de force is that you understand not just how good it is but how pretty it is only when you listen up.

Even more than, speak of the devil, Garth Brooks, she's a creature of the recording industry and the smorgasbord-of-the-air it's laid out everywhere. Are the emotions she displays so pithily as synthetic in the end as her harmonica-with-strings or steel/slide guitar? Does that make them less real?

For any Upper West Side showbiz kid, musical comedy is mother's milk, more "natural" than the rude attack of rock or the polite confessional of folk ... With crucial help from Jon Brion, she's got the Richard Rodgers/Kurt Weill part down, and will surely tackle the Dorothy Fields/Lorenz Hart part later.

More trip- than hip-hop in that its irresistibility is atmospheric -- a sound that pits industrial textures against quiet piano samples/parts.

This is so pretty it's almost a poem about quiet lyricism--and so passive you want to put crystal meth in its apple juice.

Even the "jazz" and "punk" cuts are good for a few laughs -- total losers are rare indeed.

But though the blues and gospel and more gospel testify not just for song but for body and spirit, they wouldn't shout anywhere near as loud and clear without the mastermind's ministrations--his grooves, his pacing, his textures, his harmonies, sometimes his tunes...