Buenas Noches from a Lonely Room

If absolutely nothing else, "Buenas Noches From A Lonely Room" will stand forever as the album that drew the great Buck Owens out of a premature retirement as Dwight Yoakam resurrected Buck's old tune "Streets of Bakersfield" and pulled Buck along to duet with him on it. This disc firmly fixed Yoakam's position as a solid performer and superior real country artist, with some of the sharpest, wittiest, and most cutting lyrics in his career to date.

'Buenas Noches From A Lonely Room' was DwightYoakam's third album, and it demonstrated amply that Yoakam was no flash-in-the-pan. He was a true artist, fully worthy of his hillbilly tag, and he was here to stay. Amidst some of Yoakam's own best original works are several covers, including of course the amazing hit duet with Buck Owens, "Streets of Bakersfield" (his first #1 single), as well as J.D. Miller's "I Hear You Knockin'," Hank Locklin's "Send Me The Pillow" and Johnny Cash's "Home of the Blues." But it was the impressive #1 weeper "I Sang Dixie" which really blasted this album from merely extraordinary into the stratosphere.

With his signature pain-saturated lyrics and infectious honky-tonk sound, Yoakam simply delivers with this glorious, unpretentious, darkly subtle album. The impressive title track, a tale of jealousy and murder, is still one of the most breathtaking songs Yoakam performs in concert. Yet the opening track, "I Got You" (which reached #5 on the charts), is actually pretty darned chipper, proving he's not all sorrow.

There's nothing but solid, wall-to-wall talent with any Dwight Yoakam album, and this one plain delivers that talent on a silver tray. In many ways, it could easily be called the quintessential Yoakam album... not to mention the awesome shot of those long legs in black leather on the album cover.