It's taken a while for Johnette Napolitano, the powerful singer and songwriter from the defunct Concrete Blonde, to find her way, but she hasn't been in a hurry. She released a couple of records independently through CD Baby, collaborated with Talking Heads when they re-formed without David Byrne, worked on film soundtracks, made a film herself, made her own clothes, and bought a cabin in the desert over 130 miles from her former home in Los Angeles. Napolitano is no stranger to letting out what's inside in her lyrics -- remember Concrete Blonde's greatest recorded statement, Bloodletting? Scarred is her first widely distributed solo project; it's so naked, emotionally intense, and honest that it's bound to make some people nervous, but it will lure in many others (if they get the chance to hear it). Scarred was written mostly in her cabin and recorded in Los Angeles and in London. She co-produced the set with Danny Lohner; it was engineered and mixed by her old CB mate, James Mankey. Lohner played electric guitar on the set, but Napolitano did everything else. Napolitano wrote or co-wrote ten of the album's 12 cuts, and there is a pair of covers in Coldplay's Scientist and the Lou Reed-penned Velvet Underground nugget All Tomorrow's Parties. The covers are fine; they add atmosphere and textural changes to a poetically revealing recording that deals with everything from entropy to revelation to psychological and emotional damage to yearning (both spiritual and carnal). Take the title track, which begins with a lone acoustic guitar and then builds in layers dynamically and texturally until it threatens to overcome the listener -- sonically with careening guitars, thudding drums, and swirling keyboards, and psychically with lyrics that deal with an emotionally paralyzed person who cannot feel or relate to being connected to the world. She can't sleep for over a day, and fights the disconnection and grief that have caused the condition. This is not only a broken love song; it is a testament that has been shattered down to the basics of functioning. By the time the guitar solo enters and the tune begins again in a circular fashion, you are no longer hearing a song, but through your aural senses are looking so deep inside the protagonist that you may be tempted to hit "skip."

1		Amazing
2		The Scientist
3		Scarred
4		Poem for the Native
5		My Diane
6		Just Like Time
7		Save Me
8		Like a Wave
9		Crazy Tonight
10		Everything for Everyone
11		All Tomorrow's Parties
12		I'm Up Here