(Engine Room)

www.tracybonham.com

With an album title referencing Walt Whitman's "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," Bonham's no dummy. Tracks that could blur into monotony are separated by changing tones and structures. A band of supportive minstrels has arrived with the full range of Crayola colors for perfect shadings and fills. 

 "Devil's Got Your Boyfriend" sinks its hooks in with a storyline all too familiar to some women (and, well, some men). Real grabber's the humid N'awlins ambience, replete with a Tipitina's name-drop - how cool is that? --  topped off by a catchy chorus. Nothin' that new, its charming quirkiness is likely to appeal to a 30- and 40-something, Aimee Mann-mad audience. A few more angles are indicated on "Your Night Is Wide Open," which rows in lazily with evocative imagery, drawn out with perfect vocal nuances: "Chinese lanterns... strung above downtown Los Angeles/Glow softly... make the bums seem... at the party"

The chunky pop of "Big Red Heart" would go well with Sheryl Crow. Bonham's staccato violin sets the pace for Tom Waits-ish dynamics on "Josephine." Lovely violin/guitar phrases and a Beatlesque melody make "When You Laugh The World Laughs With You" worth hearing, perhaps repeatedly. Dashes of piano glamour and a minimal format throw Bonham's vocal into shadow-puppet emphasis for "Reciprocal Feelings."

Bonham's marriage, and a migration from Los Angeles to Woodstock/Brooklyn, add stories likely to interest the already-converted. "In The Moonlight" mixes from-the-car musings with something like Paul McCartney's ecstatic pastoral missives. That "Moonlight" is followed by the upbeat hi jinx of "You're My Is-Ness" starts to lose one unconverted listener. There's the cleverness of choruses emulating ‘30s/'40s pop harmonies, and another shift in tone/beat. But by this ninth track, at least one person feels it's possible to have heard enough of Ms. Bonham's knowing vocals, especially after sitting through the lauded-by-some, tedious-to-one observations of "We Moved Our City To The Country," which follows the relative ingenuity of "We'll bathe in puddles in the parking lots of Home Depot" with the aggressively cute, "We'll lower our voices when we speak up on our cell phones/I hear a young sparrow/Oh, it's your ringtone, it's your ringtone."

DOWNLOAD: "When You Laugh The World Laughs With You," "Reciprocal Feelings" MARY LEARY