"By nature, I think I have always been simultaneously extremely traditional and extremely off the map," explained Jimmie Dale Gilmore. "My previous recordings have always addressed the traditional side. This was a time to let the audience in on a different side that is crucial to me."

As its title suggests, this album is a brave and new adventure for Gilmore. Though he has been typecast as a traditionalist, Gilmore has long been a radical visionary, more open to possibility than practically any artist I know. His new music features textures, rhythms and atmospheres that are so strikingly different from his previous work that some listeners might consider this artistic progression a mystery. According to producer T-Bone Burnett, the answer to the riddle of Gilmore's musical transformation can be found beneath the big skies of Texas, where both were raised.

"I wanted to make a real West Texas record, where you could see the horizon all around you for a long ways," explained Burnett. "I remember when I was a kid growing up in Fort Worth, we lived on a bluff, looking west. And you could see these thunderstorms coming from a couple hundred miles away."

"It would start off like a little black thumb sticking up on the horizon. And as it would come closer the sky would get darker and darker, and then it would be black, and then there'd be lightning, and then it would be all purple and orange and gold, just a blurred mass of beauty all around. And then there'd be these beautiful blue skies... I wanted to make a record like that."

Welcome to Jimmie Dale Gilmore's thunderstorm. The impetus for this creative cloudburst came from Gilmore's desire to record an album that would reinforce his ties to the rock 'n' roll side of West Texas, his kinship with Lubbock homeboy Buddy Holly and Gilmore's favorite singer, Roy Orbison. He didn't want to mimic or rehash the '50s classics, but to recapture the wildness, the spirit of discovery, the sense of spontaneous combustion from which that music exploded.

"Despite how I've been classified by the accidents of my career, I think that rock 'n' roll is the real thing I come out of, and the thing I've loved the most," said Gilmore. "I told T-Bone I didn't want to make a Roy Orbison album, but I wanted to go in with the attitude Orbison, his producers and his musicians did, more of an anything-goes attitude. And T-Bone knew what I was talking about, and maybe even took it further than I understood was possible."

The result is an album of extremes, one which pushes Gilmore's musical impulses as far as they can go. He has never rocked harder than on "Outside the Lines," written a deeper song than "Headed for a Fall," surrounded himself with noisier guitars than on the title cut, sung anything with more open-hearted tenderness than "Come Fly Away" or with as much rawness as his raucous version of "Black Snake Moan." There is no room for caution here, no safe middle ground. In Gilmore's music, opposites attract and contradictions dissolve.

Listen to the rhythmic renewal of "Because of the Wind," a Joe Ely song that Gilmore has been singing for 25 years, since the days when the two of them and boyhood buddy Butch Hancock began playing for fun in a Lubbock band called the Flatlanders. Since then, they have continued to treat their songwriting as communal property: Jimmie is fond of calling his own "Dallas" a Joe Ely song that Gilmore happened to write, while considering "Because of the Wind" a Gilmore song that Ely happened to write. On this album, it has also become a Jim Keltner song, a testament to the alchemy of a percussion wizard.

"Keltner was really the brains behind a lot of how this album sounds," said Gilmore of the renowned drummer. "I got a real musical education from T-Bone and the guys, and a lot of it was learning to hear things through Keltner's ears. He's so amazingly conscious of rhythm, feeling and tonality.

"In effect the band is a trio: Keltner, Greg Leisz and Jon Brion," he continued. "The very first thing we cut was 'Braver Newer World,' and that thing that Jon Brion put on it, which we ended up calling the 'Bombay guitar,' just sounded strange to me. Eventually, I came to this feeling that he was just seeing a bigger, broader picture than I was. I think he's a musical genius.

"Greg, though musically he's very much on a par with the others, was the one who tied things back into my world, who is much more anchored in the same roots that I am. And the cuts that bassist Jerry Scheff was on, he was as essential to that inventive process as any of those guys."

As the band's interplay provides cohesion amid the album's stylistic diversity, the material shows the various elements that are essential to Gilmore's musical identity. Like the Ely song, both "Come Fly Away" and "Sally" by Al Strehli harken back to Gilmore's Lubbock days. Little known outside a small circle of songwriters (his sister Angela has achieved a higher profile as a blues singer), Strehli had an early and profound impact on his West Texas peers.

"I've felt all along that he was of the caliber of the Beatles and Bob Dylan or Leonard Cohen - totally unique, totally his own voice." said Gilmore, who has been singing "Sally" since the mid-'60s, and recorded two other Strehli songs on his previous Spinning Around the Sun album. "He was a fully-formed artist as a writer when we were just starting, and I think that he was maybe the single most important influence on our little circle, outside of famous people."

At another extreme, Gilmore crawls inside the country blues of Blind Lemon Jefferson's "Black Snake Moan" as if it were a second skin. "When I first discovered that music, I could hear so much of where Hank Williams came from," he said. "Somehow there was this intuitive connection, like, 'Ah, here's the wellspring!'"

Of the newer material, "Where Is Love Now" provided the biggest challenge for Gilmore. Written for him by Sam Phillips, the song required a different approach from the Texas tunes that felt like home to him. "I loved it the first time I heard it, but I couldn't imagine me singing it," Gilmore said. "My voice understands certain melodic things, and it had to learn this. I told T-Bone that the only way I could sing it was by doing my imitation of Sam. And he said, 'Well, that's all right, because she's doing her imitation of you.'"

Then again, producer Burnett feels that Gilmore could sing just about anything: "He just has a classic voice, with a West Texas dusty honesty about it," said T-Bone. "Most of the people I've worked with are writers who sing a little bit; Jimmie's a singer who writes a little bit. I think of him as a singer like Tony Bennett or Frank Sinatra, and as good as any of them."

For those who consider Jimmie a throwback to an earlier era--a Rip Van Gilmore of country anachronism--this album represents a bold leap into uncharted territory. As Gilmore sings on "Outside the Lines," "I painted myself into a corner, but footprints are just about to become part of my design." Within this braver newer world, there are no borders, no fences, no maps, no limits. Just an endless horizon. . .and an occasional cloudburst.

-Don McLeese Austin, Texas