Today's country music radio isn't so country these days. Since the ascendance of the Shania Twains and Faith Hills, steel guitar solos have mostly fallen victim to the ear-splitting ravages of loud heavy metal-like guitars. Vocal distinction has mostly given way to strivings for mediocrity. And the songs are almost always co-written by folks more familiar with The Eagles, Kiss and Joni Mitchell than Merle Haggard, Harlan Howard and Tom T. Hall.

So what's available for a hard-core country singer and songwriter of strength like Texan Rodney Hayden?

If radio won't have him, then who will? How in tarnation can he expect to garner a following to sustain a career if no one has a solid chance of hearing his music? Imagine making a product, a high quality product, and then having so few ways to market it. That's sort of the dilemma that Hayden and folks of his ilk face nowadays.

Enter Audium Records. Nashville's leading purveyor of traditional country music circa 2003 added to its roster of the likes of Ray Price and Dwight Yoakam when it signed Hayden and recently issued his second album, "Living the Good Life."

Recorded at The Hit Shack in Austin, the record follows his excellent 2001 debut "The Real Thing," which came via Robert Earl and Katherine Keen's Rosetta Records.

All that sounds fine. Hayden is making music, fine music, and touring all over Texas in the hope that some day his songs might make as much hay as say Alan Jackson or Travis Tritt.

But here's the kicker: barely out of his teens Hayden darn near signed with mighty MCA Nashville several years back.

Then-label chief Tony Brown loved Hayden's heart-on-his-sleeve country style. Like the Keens, he also noticed the youngster's considerable singing and songwriting talents.

Brown even produced three songs on Hayden - "The Real Thing," "You Don't Talk, I Don't Listen" and "I'll Give You Love" - all of which ended up on his first album.

So Hayden signed with MCA, had a lot of hits and became a big star. Right? Not quite.

No deal came with MCA.

"Tony wanted to sign me real bad, but what it came down to was that someone over there must have thought I was too country," Hayden says by phone from Texas. "I love Tony. He was straight up front with me and wanted me on MCA real bad, but it was out of his hands."

So Hayden went his way, and Brown went his. Interestingly, superstar George Strait, whose longtime label just happens to be MCA, later recorded "The Real Thing" in strikingly similar fashion as Hayden's.

But instead of running like a scared hound dog with his tail between his legs, the thin Texan simply made do with what he had. He finished his debut under the apt and able production guidance of Clay Blaker and Rich Brotherton.

Robert Earl Keen served as executive producer. True, his debut amounted to peanuts sold as compared to what could have been with MCA. Regardless of sales, the album stands as a testimony to an artist who should command attention aplenty all over Nashville's Music Row.

Brotherton then produced Hayden's latest album. Yet another disc doused in quality country music that once again should draw notice like a hound dog draws ticks and fleas, "Living the Good Life" documents Hayden's considerable and growing talent one tune at a time.

"I'm proud of this record," Hayden says. "I think the songs have more variety than the first album, and not all of them are what I would call traditional country. But I am country and would not want to be anything else."

As the Texas drawling Hayden rightly noted, the new album is rife with variety, most of which meander within country's boundaries.

Take songs like "Goodbye to My Hometown" and his cover of Slaid Cleaves' "Broke Down." Each evokes a moody sense of lives led that country music built its music on. Character and charm blooms like a thatch of roses in spring. With each lyric, a story unfolds little by little, until at which point the song opens wide into an artful thing of beauty.

In that sense, Hayden belies his relative newcomer status. But then, with musical heroes such as Merle Haggard, Lefty Frizzell and Willie Nelson, he's attached himself to some of the country's all-time greatest purveyors of classic country songs.

"Those guys are my heroes," Hayden says. "They wrote songs that became classics because they're real, and they were country. And man, getting to meet Haggard was the best. Just the best."

So goes but one perk, even for an artist on an independent label. Hayden co-wrote 8 of the album's 11 tunes (compared to 7 of 11 on his first album), he says that several of the album's cover tunes could also very well have come from his pen.

"Clay Blaker and Tracy Byrd's 'Living Everyday Like It's Saturday Night' sounds like it came right from my life," Hayden says. "That's what I liked about the song. It sounded real. Plus it came from Clay Blaker and Tracy Byrd."

Indeed, Hayden could have done much worse than to record their song, which stands as a modern-day honky tonker. But if you want to take a peek into Hayden's life as he knows it today, check out the title track, "Living the Good Life."

Despite having lost a shot at signing with MCA, he takes a wise philosophical approach to life. In short, the song whittles life down to its essentials for him. He has his youth, health, good family, a nice house, a nice truck and a place to go fishing. Now, what more could a country boy possibly want out of life?

"That's it. That song means a lot because it's me right now," he says. "I'm not rich and don't need to be. I'm making music, playing music for people and making a living from it. Some crowds are larger than others, and some crowds are really small. But I still have my house, family, truck and so on. It's a good life. I have no complaints."

Another slice of Hayden's life comes via "Goodbye to My Hometown," which he wrote with frequent collaborator Bill Whitbeck. Chances are we all look back from time to time to where we came from and what once was the town that we knew, but, of course, as time passes and we change, so too do the places where we came from.

"Everybody knows everything about everyone," the song goes. But "before you know it you're not a kid, and you realize how small it is, can't wait until the day you leave it in the past."

"I think most of us can find something to relate to in that song, especially anyone from a small town," Hayden says. "We can't wait to leave home for a bigger and better place, yet how many of us later look back and see that that small town looks pretty good after all? We sometimes don't know what we have and where we are until we know longer have it."

Perhaps the album's most attractive and everlasting song comes via Hayden's "Mr. Mockingbird." It sounds like a country song from the 1950s. Its straightforward and simple lyrical and musical content hearkens to a day when country singers didn't sing songs with lyrics enough to fill a book.

"That song sounds really neat to me, too," Hayden says. "Bill Whitbeck (the co-writer) and I were going for that old country sort of feel in the lyrics. I think maybe we pulled that off."

Indeed. As time goes by chances are that Hayden will pull off quite a few more songs that hit like a hammer on a nail. Just read Keen, offers by way of praise in the album's publicity materials. "Rodney Hayden is a double eagle, grand slam, black Jack talent. He makes me want to give up my night job."

With words such as those, it sounds like the boy has a lot to live up to there. But then refreshing it is when a talent such as Hayden gets turned back from a label like MCA, and doesn't bemoan the fact. Instead, he registers it to experience.

"I'm young. Maybe one day I'll get another chance, but for now I'm proud to be making records for Audium and playing music on stage," he says. "What more can I ask for?"