Read My Mind

Few artists have sung about marital infidelity as often as Reba McEntire, and she returns to the theme on her triumphant Read My Mind. No moment better illuminates what a marriage is really made of than the moment when a wife confronts a cheating husband, and McEntire returns to that showdown again and again. On "I Won't Stand in Line," McEntire addresses a husband who is quite nice to her when she's around but equally nice to lots of other women when she's not. On "I Wish That I Could Tell You," McEntire plays the wife in a lifeless marriage who wishes she could make it easy for her husband to go. "Till You Love Me" and the album's title track are both straightforward love songs with juicy melodies, and McEntire opens up her enormous, gospelish voice on them as if she were Nashville's Whitney Houston-- another big-throated singer with an instinct for the emotional jugular. -- Geoffrey Himes