With melodies and lyrics that whisper and linger, you’ll hear her voice, familiar yet new, rise like smoke from simmering coals. You’ll find silent moments that pull us closer, rather than jam-packed mixes that push us away.

And, of course, there’s that elusive last ingredient: her unique talent, nurtured through a career that stretches back to age fifteen and during which she has won and been nominated for various Grammys, written some of the best songs of the era, acted in films and TV, and been honored by the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences with a Governor’s Award.

Put it this way: WHEN I LOOK DOWN THAT ROAD is more than a great album--more, even, than the best in this artist’s catalog of remarkable works. It is also her commitment to a new creative method of stripping aside the extraneous elements in order to get to what really matters: the heart of the song.

Think of it in visual terms, as MELISSA does herself. WHEN I LOOK DOWN THAT ROAD is sculpture: You chisel and chip, cut away the rubble, then smooth and polish, until you’ve found the soul within the stone.

MELISSA had tried doing it the other way, with success, but her last few projects wound up alienating her from her own authentic voice. “I left because I could no longer make records that sounded less and less like me,” she explains. “I tried to please people instead of believing in my own strength, until the only thing I could do was walk away.”

She stayed busy, doing concerts, winning praise from Stephen Sondheim for her performance of his songs in the show Sweeney Todd, writing a musical (I Sent a Letter to My Love) and a film score (Lady and the Tramp II, on which she also sang), and scheduling her professional life around raising her children—“my priority number one!” But she stayed away from the record business, feeling like an outcast from a place where she once felt at home…

…until a tentative return in 1997, with a holiday album, JOY. The project took her, for the first time, to Nashville--which, unexpectedly, felt strangely familiar. “Everybody wants to write a hit song, but in Nashville people want to write the best song, which was my original intention as a singer/songwriter. It reminded me of how I started writing with Carole Sager, when I’d go to her apartment in New York, we’d make a cup of coffee--and after five hours of conversation, we’d have a song.”

Inspired, MELISSA began connecting with new writing partners, including, for the first time, the legendary Paul Williams. They hit it off immediately, produced several songs, including “Crazy Loving You,” whose vivid lyrics (“you and your Houdini explanations”) help make it a prominent cut on WHEN I LOOK DOWN THAT ROAD, and even put a show together, Songs and Stories, in which they play each other’s material and let the audience in on some of their creative secrets. Their collaboration also led directly to the new album, when Paul offered MELISSA some blunt advice.

“He told me, ‘You have to get your ass back to Nashville and write!’” MELISSA laughs. “It was wonderful, because these writers still court each other there in quiet rooms, where their new songs would come out of the silence.”

It was, in other words, as organic as the process MELISSA had brought to writing “Midnight Blue,” ”Whenever I Call You Friend,” “Come In From The Rain” and the other songs she had made classics years before. The same aesthetic guided her, along with co-producers Kevin DeRemer and Stephan Oberhoff, as they began assembling this material into album form. “I had finished that chapter of my life where I would hope that somebody at the record company liked what I did and then wait for them to make scads of suggestions for improvements,” she says. “This time, I knew that I had something that could make people remember what they hadn’t even realized they’d forgotten, which was that music, driven by melody and lyric, can still make you cry. And so we sculpted these songs in the studio. We took out more and more sound, making each song quieter and quieter, until we found the inner life.”

What’s left is the essence of each song, arranged minimally, with nothing obstructing the path between it and the listener. Rhythms are subtle and suggestive--a hand drum, a triangle, the soft tick of maracas. Textures are airy yet seductive; a single cello line on songs like the languorous “I’ll Know You By Your Heart” or the dark and stately “Bend” speaks more eloquently than a full bank of synthesized strings.

Lyrically, too, these songs cast spells that linger after the music wisps into silence. Few singer/songwriters can carry listeners to places this far away or deep within our own hearts. With a twist of a single line, she brings life to people drawn from history (Gertrude Stein, in “When Paris Was a Woman,” was “my shepherdess, my Pyrenees,” Melissa writes, “with eagle eyes, a mountain range was she”) or from the streets in our own time (the character Pearl--crazy but maybe also enlightened, buried in a funky comforter and haunted by miracles in “Angels Dancing”). Fewer still can come up with material that’s sometimes playful (“Hey, baby, you’re no saint, even with a new coat of paint,” she teases in “Lucky Break,” written one upbeat day with Beth Nielsen Chapman) and sometimes anguished (“Give me the strength to lead the way/Send me the words I need to say,” she pleads, for her children and ours, in “A Mother’s Prayer,” written with Karen Taylor Good just hours after the Columbine tragedy).

And in the first single, “After All This Time,” the elements come together: a melody that nestles into a comfortable groove, Keb’ Mo’s sensually empathetic slide guitar rising like smoke through the air of Melissa’s piano. “Me and that silv’ry moon watched silently as you breathed,” sings MELISSA. “ I wouldn’t break the spell, even to steal a kiss…After all this time, baby, we got this right.” Soulful and intimate, her voice is close to what we might hear in our own imaginations when we savor the pleasures of love as alive as if it had begun only yesterday.

Each track is distinctive, yet all unite into a single listening experience--another nod toward a time when context was as important as the merits of the songs themselves. WHEN I LOOK DOWN THAT ROAD echoes MELISSA’s finest achievements and heralds the beginning of an even more fruitful phase.

With WHEN I LOOK DOWN THAT ROAD, one of our finest talents has made herself complete--again. And this time, because it’s on her terms, it’s forever.

MELISSA MANCHESTER
ON
‘WHEN I LOOK DOWN THAT ROAD’:

CUT BY CUT

I'll Know You By Your Heart
“The direct inspiration for this song was a dream I had where I was on a battlefield, wearing an 1890s gown, and I saw this tiny oil painting. When I shared that scenario with Sharon Vaughn, she said, ‘Okay, let's get going,’ and we wrote the song together from that.”

Angels Dancing
“It was like writing a play or a short movie. I love to write songs like that, because you can get lost in the language, yet you want to be very clear so that the audience gets it. Those songs take some work, but they're very satisfying. And how great is it that we actually have a Senegalese drummer playing a rhythm about dancing angels?”

Bend
“When Canadian singer-songwriter Wendy Lands came to me with the idea and the title, I realized that these four letters just say so much. They're the essence of what a relationship is about--the compromise, the dance. You bend, not to break but because that's the only way you can go through life with someone you love. If you're lucky, they bend with you.”

When Paris Was A Woman
“I've always been fascinated with Paris in the twenties, with Gertrude Stein's salon and the people who came through there. I'd read The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas a dozen times; it's like a travelogue of that time and place, and I wanted to capture that. I wanted to create a scene where, even if you didn't know who these people were, I could convey how incredible it must have been to have all these people in one room. When I found a way to create this play about these people, it was through the voice of Alice, Gertrude's partner. It was fabulous to finally give birth to this song.”

After All This Time
“Blue Miller wrote this melody and I took it home with me to Los Angeles. Sometimes, when I need to shake some words out of my brain, I'll read through books by the great lyricists. In this case it was Johnny Mercer: I kept reading his lyrics and thinking, ‘What would he do with this kind of a song?’ He had such a magnificent way of writing sentimentally. So I sat next to my bed, at my desk, looking through his lyrics, playing the tape of ‘After All This Time’--and the words just rose up from the dust and came to me.”

Lucky Break
“I went over to Beth Nielsen-Chapman's house with no preconceived notion of what we would write. She said, ‘Let's write this!’ and she started pumping this rhythm. I said, ‘Okay, I'm along for the ride,’ and I started singing these words, and she said, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah!’ It was actually a challenge, because with these rhythmic songs you're either in the pocket or you're working too hard, because the words are so percussive. So we just went for a long walk around Radner Lake in Nashville until we could get all the words to flow and carve out the quirkiness.”

When I Look Down That Road
“This was the first song I've written with Stephony Smith. She had this title, so I wrote the first verse--and when I played it for her she said, ‘I have to leave the room now’ and went off crying. ‘A parched September morning’ does get to the fact that 9/11 affected, forever, how we move forward in our lives. When you're raising children and you've been married for a long time and people in your life have died and events that you couldn't imagine would happen actually do…you get very still because these things are so important.”

Where The Truth Lies
“I wrote this with Rupert Holmes because he had written a novel with the same title and he thought it would fun to write a song that we could record and maybe insert into the front flap. That part never happened, but we had a splendid time. The more I thought about the book, which is really wonderful and funny and mysterious and smart, the more I started to hear this music. So when I flew to New York I played it for him and he said, ‘Well, now. That's the song.’ And we finished it together. It's like a fifties Lauren Bacall movie; I can just see her amazing eyes in this music.”

Thank You For Your Faith In Me
“This is actually how I end my prayers when I sit at the dinner table with my kids: ‘Thank you, God, for your faith in us.’ The song comes out of the personal walk that I walked and surviving to learn my lessons and knowing that God and the universe had not lost faith in me, had brought me to my knees, had made the lessons large enough for me to actually get them.”

Still Myself
“Very simply, this is based on the eulogy I wrote for my father. Coupled with all the turmoil in the world today, you see things…and lose people…but you keep moving on. That's what life is about.”

Crazy Loving You
“This is the foundation; the album grew from this song. Paul Williams and I wrote it together, and the power of his lyrics and the music that it evoked were so deep and subdued that it took me back to my original intention as a singer/songwriter. I was informed by the music of Laura Nyro and Joni Mitchell and Stevie Wonder and the Beatles and Sly and the Family Stone, who all came--particularly the women--out of an extremely personal, poetic place. When you follow that model, when you write for yourself rather than for another artist, you can take more artistic liberty. And writing with Paul made me think, ‘This is entirely possible to do.’”

A Mother's Prayer
“This was written the day after Columbine. I was at Los Angeles Airport, waiting for my flight to write with Karen Taylor Good in Nashville, when the news came on television. I couldn't believe it, so when I got to Nashville I said to Karen, ‘I don't know what you think we're going to write, but I hope you'll help me write through how I'm feeling.’ I had to write my anxieties out because I'd never experienced that kind of fever about children. And now, when I perform it at shows, people in the audience weep or call their kids and tell them they love them. To me, as a writer, that's amazing.”