OBJECTIONABLE MATERIAL
None.

WORLDVIEW
Like wine, music rooted in the truth improves with age.

OVERALL QUALITY
As music, these down-home performances of traditional songs function as bearers of good news; as the soundtrack to the Coen Brothers film of the same name, they take on surreal and at times comical overtones; as a cottage industry they've spawned the just-released Down from the Mountain (Lost Highway Records), a companion live album featuring many of these same musicians.

OBJECTIONABLE MATERIAL
"The Devil Went Down to Georgia" (Charlie Daniels's original, unexpurgated version), "The Right Kind of Wrong" (casual profanity).

WORLDVIEW
These haphazardly collated songs develop no worldview as such, but the film that they accompany does: that working as a sex object at a metropolitan bar qualifies as a legitimate way for an aspiring singer-songwriter with supermodel looks to pay her dues.

OVERALL QUALITY
Half LeAnn Rimes vehicle and half pop sampler, this soundtrack succeeds as neither.

OBJECTIONABLE MATERIAL
None.

WORLDVIEW
That in slighting the woman who loves him, a man plants the seeds of his own unhappiness.

OVERALL QUALITY
One welcomes the success of a talented, clean-cut young hunk who sings all the right things about all the right topics, but when the statements are clichés and the hooks like nets spread in plain sight of the birds, one can't help feeling manipulated.

OBJECTIONABLE MATERIAL
None, assuming that the temptress in "Every Little Thing She Does" and "Out Go the Lights" is the singer's wife and not his paramour.

WORLDVIEW
Nothing beats the love of a good woman, kids who miss their daddy when he's gone, going the extra mile to make a marriage work, and country music turned up loud on a Friday night.

OVERALL QUALITY
Pleasant, if superficial-to 30-something country what 'N Sync and Backstreet Boys are to teeny-bop.

OBJECTIONABLE MATERIAL
"Telluride" (which wistfully commemorates an extra-marital winter fling).

WORLDVIEW
Touchingly humble-whether celebrating a marriage ("Set This Circus Down"), lamenting a breakup ("Angry All the Time"), waxing corny ("Grown Men Don't Cry"), or stating an explicitly biblical worldview ("Angel Boy"), Mr. McGraw's point of view is resolutely Common Man.

OVERALL QUALITY
Unlike his bio-dad Tug, Tim McGraw is no master of the screwball; if these songs were pitches, they'd be batting-practice fastballs right down the middle, with hits the objective.