Radney Foster is not and may never be a household name. But if you spend any time at all poking around the country music business, it's fairly hard to miss his significant contributions to the genre.

Foster began his recording career in the late '80s by making 3 albums with the influential Foster & Lloyd duo before becoming a solo artist. He had a hit right off the bat with "Just Call Me Lonesome," taken from his debut solo release, "Del Rio, Texas, 1959."

He also placed the wonderfully personal lullaby, "Godspeed," on the Dixie Chicks' "Home" release, and has had numerous other artists record his songs.

And if all that work isn't enough to make any self-respecting job experience profile bulge at the seams, he even hosted CMT's "Crossroads" TV program for one year.

"It was real fun," Foster recalls of his brief TV experience. "If somebody told me I'd have to do that to make a living, I would definitely be an unhappy guy because I like playing and singing a whole lot better."

So how in fact did the CMT folks come up with Foster's name in the first place?

"They definitely wanted a singer-songwriter," Foster theorizes. "To be quite frank, I think there was some sort of connection with how the PBS series 'Sessions at West 54th Street' was done. They felt like you'd get better questions when a musician was interviewing another musician. You'd get this sort of better rapport and consequently better questions."

Foster probably had more fun just hanging out with his fellow musicians, than with making TV programs. "That was my favorite part - the part you (the TV viewer) didn't see."

But even though Foster had plenty of fun in front of the camera, he probably had even more of a blast behind the scenes making "And Then There's Me (The Back Porch Sessions)," his new, mostly acoustic release self-released through his web site.

Usually when artists do such unplugged things, they fill these discs with powered-down retreads. You know, hits without all the studio bells and whistles. But Foster, in clear contrast to this general rule of thumb, packed his new outing with mostly new songs. So one just has to ask why he wanted to fly so flagrantly in the face of conventional industry wisdom.

"I've just got so many songs," Foster admits with a chuckle. "I think there's probably going to be two songs off of this one that go over to the next album. And I just felt like the fans are always after me to do this kind of thing. And in particular, they're always after me whenever I play live in just an acoustic setting. About a third of my (live) dates, are me and my guitar dates, and two-thirds are with my band. And I like doing both. And even during those band dates, I always break down and do a couple of songs just acoustically."

But whether he's with or without his band, being on the road has become an increasingly difficult task for Foster.

"The road is hard on me and harder on my family. I got three children and a great wife, and I really miss 'em when I'm gone. That's the part I hate. I love performing, but I hate being on the road. I generally do between 50 and 75 dates a year."

Nevertheless, this latest re-lease's combination of a stripped down setting, combined with its bevy of new material, makes it an excellent vehicle to promote on the road.

"I figured that I could go out and do new shows, and the audiences would really be happy with new songs, rather than, 'Ah yeah, he's rehashing some of the old stuff.'"

This latest recording is also a CD booklet credit reader's dream since Foster has collaborated with a number of other high profile songwriters on its songs.

One of the most surprising names listed there is that of Austin's Dale Watson. He and Foster co-wrote "And Then There's Me," surprising, since Watson is much more of a cryin' in the beer, honk-tonker, in contrast to the more literate Foster.

"I've known Dale a long time. I really like him. He's really a nice guy. We were just fans of each other's music, and he always loved that 'Del Rio, Texas, 1959' record," Foster explains. "So we were just talking one day about how we loved Jim Reeves, and that nobody wrote that way anymore. Nobody does that or the sort of Ray Price doing 'For The Good Times.' That's a Kris Kristofferson song. You've got a literate guy who's writing really stone cold country songs. So we started just fooling around with it, and that's what we came up with."

Foster, who also co-wrote with Jack Ingram ("Never Gonna Fly") and Cory Morrow ("If You Can't Be Good (Be Lucky)" to create the songs for this CD, finds both benefits and drawbacks to either collaborating with other writers or writing by himself.

"I like 'em both," Foster notes. "The reality is that you write different songs by yourself than you would write with somebody else. And neither one is necessarily better. There are certainly songs that I've written by myself that I don't ever put out because they're not very good. I tend to be one of those guys where if you hear 10 songs on a record, I've probably written 30 others. I don't think of myself as prolific because I have friends who write a hundred songs a year who are in the Nashville staff songwriter kind of mode. I think of that as prolific. That's kind of insane prolific. And I would say that of those 30 (that I write), I probably write 10 or 12 on my own and maybe another 20 with somebody else."

But even with all of his success as a songwriter and a performer, he never relies solely on his own opinion when it comes to selecting songs for any new album.

"I throw them all into the same pile and let whoever's either co-producing with me (help judge them). Even if I'm producing a record myself, I've always sort of had someone to run these songs by. You gotta run that stuff by somebody else. You have to run it up someone else's flagpole a couple of times and get another perspective. More often than not, the things that I've written on my own have been the things that I've gotten excited about."

Songwriters are oftentimes pleased with how other artists have interpreted their songs, and Foster is especially jazzed with way the Dixie Chicks recorded his "Godspeed."

Oddly enough, this wonderful song was never a big priority with Foster when it came to pitching his songs to other artists.

"I never thought I would ever record it," he states matter-of-factly. "The first time I recorded it, I made a cassette with it five times in a row in my basement. It was kind of like the version that you heard on this ("And Then There's Me") record."

He sent this cassette to his young son who was living in Europe with his ex-wife as something to remember his daddy by.

"And then I never ever thought I'd record the song after that - ever. I don't even think I turned it in to my publisher until like six or eight months after that."

But parenthood spurred on the life of this song, in ways that few other motivators can. "So, my manager was going to be a new daddy, so I said, 'Well here, I'll put this on a cassette for you guys.' So I played it for him, and he's like, 'Oh my god, Rad, that's maybe one of the strongest things you've ever written in your life. You've got to put that thing out.' So I put it on the "See What You Wanna See" record, and Emmylou Harris came by and sang. That was a real sort special sort of moment for me because I realized this thing had a power sort of beyond anything I had ever expected."

The Dixie Chicks also recognized the special power of this one song.

"They had called me and asked me to send them some songs for this 'Home' record because they were in the middle of a lawsuit with Sony, and they were like, 'We're making a bluegrass-based record out of our house with Natalie's dad down in Austin. And we don't even know where it's going to end up or anything, but could you please send us some songs?' So I'm like, 'Oh my God, yes I'll send you some songs.' "

"So, I sent them like five things. They gave me all their addresses, so I sent one package to each address. And Natalie had just had a baby boy. But I didn't think to put that ("Godspeed") on there. But I put a separate CD in there for her, and a little card and a plushy toy. Just a little teddy bear or something - I forget - my wife and I bought it. And I wrote a little note that said, 'This song has put my boys asleep for a long time now, and congratulations. I hope this keeps your little boy asleep, too.' Just thinking that she would enjoy it. The other things I sent them I thought, 'Ah, this will be a hit for them!' But they didn't do that. They went and cut the lullaby, instead."

This just goes to show you that, even though we may try and control our destinies, sometimes fate has other plans. Also, some of the actions we take that may seem like mistakes at first end up benefiting us in the long run.

In fact, one of the many fine new songs on this latest release is called "Half My Mistakes." Written with Bobby Houck, its lyric takes a closer look at the mistakes we all make in life.

And what are, since we're on the subject, some of Foster's best mistakes?

"Well, let me see. Getting married to my wife. If I look back on it - of that actually happening in any sort of logical manner - it probably never should have happened. The first verse of 'Fools That Dream' (also one of the new album's songs) sort of talks about that. And I think everybody told us, 'Oh my God, this is a disaster.' But it hasn't been. We're incredibly happy. It's worked out really well."

Other memorable Foster mistakes, if you want to call them that, are related to a few of his failed business ventures.

"A lot of times, you don't know whether something's a mistake until you get a lot further down the road," Foster muses. "We lost a tremendous amount of money when, sort of at the beginning of the dot com boom, I was starting my own record label and (my first wife) Elaine was trying to see if there wasn't the ability to do both a record label and an on-line magazine. And it didn't work. But I learned so much about the way the business works because of that."

Many of the most poignant mistakes a human can make occur when he or she is parenting children.

"Some of the best things that happen with my kids are where at some point - especially when you catch yourself - you go, 'You know, I was too hard on that kid. He's just a kid.'"

For Foster, a few of his parenting situations have been quite trying, to say the least.

"Having a child halfway around the world was not my doing," says Foster of the son that inspired "Godspeed." "Certainly, it could be looked at as the product of being a divorced dad, which is a big mistake. But he's a great kid, and I wouldn't trade him for anything in the world. And we've made a lot of lemonade out of a lot of lemons with him living as far away as he does, and I'm probably a better father for it."

Life teaches us that we can sometimes learn things the easy way, whereas other times we're forced - and sometimes even choose - to learn things the hard way. But if mistakes cause us to make a lot of lemonade out of a barrel of lemons, are they really even mistakes at all? Who knows?

But it doesn't take a trained student of human nature to determine that Radney Foster has made some of the best music of his career with "And Then There's Me (The Back Porch Sessions)." And nope, there's not a single lemon in the whole bunch.