One Man's Crazy (Blue Flamingo, 2006)

Mark McGuinn takes his sidewaysness to the next level on his first studio album in four years. The fully disclosed lyric of the title track is actually "One man's crazy...is another man's cool." And though for some his sounds may take some warming up to, he definitely meets his diversified lyrical mark.

Best known as the man behind the record-breaking wife fancying "Mrs. Steven Rudy," his music has always been about more than silliness. That's not to say he doesn't still offer up an enjoyably fair share of it. This similarly pulls through showing off a beautifully well-rounded sensitive and dreamer of a side too with selections such as current single "Deep," a duet with Georgette Jones on "Better a Painful Ending," an ode to America recounting September 11th in "More Beautiful Today," and "115 lbs." (The latter of which delivers a poignant play on words - the song's subject lost 115 pounds, but not quite in the conventional sense). "Y" brings about a hip-hop fiddle-laden sound to find McGuinn's "cool" as he busts rhymes, posing such questions as "why are there prisons in the land of the free?" and "why won't the cat bring the paper to me?" Stay tuned after the closing track for a hidden smooth bonus ballad.

One wonders of his obsession with unkempt tattooed women ("Centerville"), but maybe that's just some of what makes McGuinn's writing so insanely cool. He did write or co-write all of the 14 listed tracks, after all. And that's not just crazy talk.