She Used to Wanna Be a Ballerina, Buffy Sainte-Marie's seventh album, is a varied collection of new originals by the singer/songwriter, along with covers of songs by her friends. It's an ambitious work, recorded at five different studios in New York, Los Angeles, and London, and co-produced by Sainte-Marie with Jack Nitzsche, who brings in some elaborate arrangements at times, as well as musicians including sometime-bandmates in Crazy Horse, Neil Young, Danny Whitten, Ralph Molina, and Billy Talbot. They are heard, for instance, in Sainte-Marie's feeling version of fellow Canadian Young's Helpless, a song he cut previously with Crosby, Stills, Nash Young, although it is a personal reminiscence of a Canadian childhood, and thus a song with which Sainte-Marie can identify closely. The album also boasts an excellent Gerry Goffin/Carole King song, Smack Water Jack, which Sainte-Marie performs alone to her own piano accompaniment. (The song also appears on King's LP Tapestry, released simultaneously with She Used to Wanna Be a Ballerina.) Another notable track is a previously unheard and typically poetic and emotional Leonard Cohen song, Bells, and Sainte-Marie presents her version of a song Cohen, too, has covered, Song of the French Partisan (aka The Partisan). That is far from the only politically oriented tune on the disc, though. Sainte-Marie also presents Moratorium, a reflection on troops serving, misguidedly, in her opinion, in Vietnam, which includes an expletive followed by "Bring the brothers home." A similar sentiment informs Soldier Blue, Sainte-Marie's theme song for the recently released film concerning mistreatment of American Indians, another constant in her work. The album also contains love songs like Now You've Been Gone for a Long Time, performed with equal effectiveness. She Used to Wanna Be a Ballerina finds Sainte-Marie holding onto many of the themes and the folk styles with which she began, but, with the assistance of Nitzsche and others, expanding into mainstream pop and rock successfully. ~ William Ruhlmann, Rovi

1		Rollin Mill Man
2		Smack Water Jack
3		Sweet September Morning
4		She Used to Wanna Be a Ba
5		Bells
6		Helpless
7		Moratorium
8		The Surfer
9		Song of the French Partis
10		Soldier Blue
11		Now You've Been Gone For