Sleepless

With Sleepless, Peter Wolf strips away any pretense to fashion and warmly embraces the R&B, soul, and country blues that inspired his legend in the first place. Not that Wolf has strayed very far from those roots, either when fronting the J. Geils Band or in his rewarding, if often fitful, solo career, but Sleepless presents the singer's ethos at its most naked and warmly Dylanesque. Whether revisiting Otis Rush's "Homework," seasoning William Bell's Stax track "Never Like This Before" with a dash of Muscle Shoals, palling around with the Glimmer Twins (Jagger on "Nothing but the Wheel"; Richards, along with Geils's Magic Dick, on Sonny Boy Williamson's feisty "Too Close Together"), or matching Steve Earle twang-for-twang on "Some Things You Don't Want to Know," it's an album filled with a spirit of warm remembrance and generosity. But more than mere love letters to his roots and heroes past, Wolf's performances on collaborations with Will Jennings and other writers have a timeless, bittersweet edge that undercut his previous instinct for blues caricature to great effect. Traditions die hard. This is a compelling testament why--and one of Wolf's most outstanding solo efforts. --Jerry McCulley