When Austin singer-songwriter Jimmy LaFave comes to mind, so does a maxim made famous by the political philosopher Sir Isaiah Berlin (1909-1997), citing Archilochus (7th century B.C.E.): "The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing." LaFave, whose music is built around his wistful tenor, is a hedgehog.

Last time around, on his Red House debut album Blue Nightfall (which I reviewed in this space on 21 May 2005), LaFave brought that patented wistful tenor to a collection of original compositions that -- with two or three honorable exceptions -- struck me as more romantic mood pieces than fully engaged songs. An album requires more than a wistful tenor, however atmospheric, striking or pretty. I wrote -- and repeat -- none of this happily, since Red House's chief is my old and valued friend Eric Peltoniemi, who personally brought the veteran LaFave to the label. A few weeks before Cimarron Manifesto's release, Eric wrote to tell me he thought I'd like this one better.

I do indeed. Maybe it helps that on Manifesto LaFave steps aside to let three other writers -- Donovan, Bob Dylan and Joe South -- interrupt the monologue. (Nightfall had only one cover tune.) Applying his wistful tenor, LaFave reshapes their songs -- each a relatively familiar one -- so creatively as to render them in some ways unrecognizable.

Compare his reading of "Not Dark Yet" to Dylan's (from his 1997 masterpiece Time Out of Mind), and you could almost swear that something you've never heard before is coming at you. I am told LaFave is a superior Dylan interpreter, but this is my first exposure to this facet of his talent. As musical meteorology goes, Donovan's "Catch the Wind" is a faint breeze. Altering tempo, fiddling with melody and taking its sentiments perhaps more seriously than they deserve, however, he manages to transform it into a mightier wind. While decent enough, his arrangement of Joe South's "Walk a Mile in My Shoes," on the other hand, is playing with material so fundamentally unpromising that it's scarcely worth the bother. Starting with the title -- snatched from an otherwise forgotten 1960s psychobabble best-seller -- "Mile" is still little more than a piling-on of self-help cliches driven by a tired blues-pop riff. It wasn't exactly crying for resurrection.

LaFave's own writing is more focused and varied than it was last time. I like "Truth," a dead-on tribute to the grand J.J. Cale, past master of the rhythm of a train pounding down rain-slicked tracks. "That's the Way It Goes" explores the hilariously goofy musical question of what happened to Peggy Sue, Lucille, Long Tall Sally, Sweet Lorraine, Mary Lou, Miss Molly, Nadine and Maybelline after their brief, shining moments in the bright spotlight of early rock 'n' roll. It turns out none came to a tragic, flaming end, but -- arguably worse -- their lives moved on to sputtering anticlimax.

Of the originals, though, "Lucky Man" and "This Land" will reside inside your head the longest. Both sail atop the flowing mid-tempo melody that, for good, bad and indifferent, is LaFave's natural mode of transportation, and both address big subjects. In the former instance, it's the love of a parent for a child, the topic of more icky songs than one can count or want to, but this is not among them. To the contrary. Any loving parent knows how frightening in its purity such love can feel, but you rarely hear it captured with such beautiful, unsparing precision in a mere song.

"This Land" takes its title from the first half of Woody Guthrie's most celebrated creation, surely America's national anthem in a parallel universe. Again, as in other LaFave songs, the narrator is driving a ribbon of highway, lost in reflection and despair. In this one he glimpses the ghosts of dispossessed Okies and their descendants, adrift on the landscape of a distressed, disoriented nation which has surrendered its liberties and its sacred name to its darkest self:

The only thing I know to say, my friends...
I simply want my country back again.

If that isn't a patriotic anthem to sustain us in the waning year and a half of this nightmarish era, then I don't know what a patriotic anthem is.