Imagine you're traveling down America's deserted highways. Your radio is broken with static, the windows are down, and the wind is twisting your hair into natty jump ropes. You're driving as hard and as fast as your shitty car will allow, living out of Chef Boyardee cans. Your neck feels like it's full of crushed glass from weeks of sleeping in the back seat. It's a beautiful life. You drive past fields of scrub-brush, tumbleweeds, and a few small towns here and there, but other than that, the whole country is yours. All you have is tomorrow. The future is only one more mile ahead of you, and everything is alright.

People have been in love with travel since our great- great granddaddies mapped that first mile of America. Boats, train tracks, Greyhound buses, it doesn't matter, just as long as we don't have to spend tomorrow in the same place we spent today. We start out wanting exciting lives-- "Walker, Texas Ranger" kind of lives-- but, alas, we know better than to try. We know that if we packed it all up and hit the highway, we would end up with hours spent driving through the dismal flatness of Montana or pissing at 2:00 a.m. in an Oregon rest- area bathroom that smells like Spam, or being made a woman by Billy and Rufus in lower Alabama. Still, despite the constant possibility of brutal anal rape we dream of the open road.

We may live chained to a desk or a wife or a computer (ahem), but we try to find our freedom somewhere else. We read books, watch movies, and buy records hoping that we can hear that staticy radio, feel the wind in our hair, and smell that overstuffed ravioli bakin' on our hot plate. Well, hobos- to- be, let me give you some entertainment suggestions for this next weekend of your sheltered, sedentary lives. If the roar of an engine were a book, it would be Jack Kerouac's "On the Road." If freedom were a movie, it would be "Easy Rider." And if the American backroads were music, they would be on Jim Greer's Rover Songs.

Now, when you compare anything to "Easy Rider" or "On the Road," you're gonna piss some people off-- usually a sewing circle of 50- year- old guys with gray and black ponytails, Jefferson Airplane t-shirts, and a 30- year- old hashish stink that they carry around with them like a lucky rabbit's foot. "But those are classics," they'll scream, and have another flashback. "But," I scream back to them, "this isn't about commercial acceptance. It's about the feeling, man." However, by now they'll be on the floor, talking to invisible lobsters about the evils of corporate America, and my message will once again fall on deaf ears.

But Rover Songs is all about the feeling, man. As the title implies, it has a traveling vibe-- a feeling of wandering, not knowing exactly where you are, where you're going, or how you're going to get there. It's the work of a modern American minstrel, Mr. Jim Greer (not the guy from Guided By Voices), a man who tells stories and mixes lyrical and musical styles the way Norman Rockwell mixed paint. It's free music-- free of pretension, free of cliches, and completely bullshit- free as Greer spins songs about old homes, medieval princes, and Mississippi riverboat fortune- tellers with equal skill. Crafting catchy melodies to float his worldview- gone- askew seems to be Greer's lot in life, and he comes out a winner more times than not. The album's opener, "Southern States," was a favorite of mine from the first note-- a clever song, as up-tempo as a bar shanty. It's catchy enough to be in Pepsi commercial, but still has a heart of gold.

The rest of the album continues to live up to the expectations, as Greer tells more stories of everyday- and not- so- everyday life. It's a hard record to write about because it's so broad in scope. Every song is a brand new town, packed with new people to see and new places to go. And as he goes on down the road, Mr. Jim switches through arrangements and musical genres like an eight- year- old flips through Saturday morning cartoons. Country, g-fuck grooves, neo- lounge music, or guitar rock jangle, it's all here. But where other records would dissolve into a sloppy mess with all that variety, Greer manages to keep it all together with his Olympic- level songwriting. No song seems to be too much of a shock from the one before, even if the styles spring up from different sides of the planet. He goes through instruments like crayons in a box, using them to paint colorful landscapes of the beautiful, strange, and fucked- up world around us.

But, like America, Rover Songs has its up and downs. For one, the album does seem to go nowhere. The best albums feel like a story, with a beginning, middle and end, but when the last Rover song fades out (the second of two hidden tracks), you feel like Greer left you hanging. There just seems to be more to say, more miles to cover. But I guess it'll wait for the follow- up album.

Some tracks on Rover Songs may be better than others, but in the end, it's not where you go that matters, it's the roads you took to get there. There may not be any huge "scheme" to the record, but the good sounds are more than enough to carry you through to the next stop on the journey.

-Steven Byrd