He ain't gettin' nowhere

And he's losin' his share

He must've gone crazy out there.

Instead of scorn, the narrator has a sort of amused sympathetic view of people who don't understand him: "Well, they never seen the Northern Lights/They never seen the hawk on the wing."

More than ever, Walker still refuses to take himself seriously for very long, and his off-beat humor runs through most of the songs. Some of them don't make much sense, at least when you're sober, like "Public Domain": "Yeah, I ran with the snuff queens in Dallas/Like I ran from Snow White in L.A./Now I've broken all my vows to Demolay." Others, like "Pot Can't Call the Kettle Black" and Willie Nelson's "Pick Up the Tempo," rely less on punch lines than on a gentle self-mocking tone. But Walker gives an authentic ring to the former ("I'm quiet and I'm proud and I'm gathering a crowd and I like gravy/'Bout half off the wall but then I learned it all in the Navy"), something Nelson could never really pull off.

Walker's own composition, "I Love You," starts out as a fairly straightforward song, but ends up on a different note:

I'd like to give you everything you'd ever want, love

Diamond rings for every toe

Danglin' earrings for your fingers

Big sparklin' rocks for your nose.

The only other song written by Walker is a bizarre number called "Pissin' in the Wind," which starts out parodying Kris Kristofferson, proceeds to self-parody, tosses in a few jokes about Walker's music buddies Guy Clark and Gary Nunn, and ends by poking fun at the folk singers of the sixties: "The answer my friend is just pissin' in the wind." It's pretty self-indulgent and not as funny as Walker would like to think.

THE MORE SERIOUS SONGS on the album are a little more even in quality. He gives a plaintive and evocative rendition of Jessie Winchester's "Mississippi You're on My Mind", a song which is all the more moving because Winchester is an exile in Canada, having left the U.S. to avoid the draft. The rich images he paints are those of someone who will never see his home again:

Think I smell the honeysuckle vine

Its thick sweetness about to make you sick

And the dogs, my brood, how they're hungry all the time