On this third CD for Dualtone, Texas singer/songwriter Radney Foster continues to take chances. Introspective yet freewheeling, This World We Live In combines Foster’s gift for literate songwriting with the rough and tumble sound of a man who’s done battle with the complexities of life. The set reunites him with producer Darrell Brown and engineer Niko Bolas, the team behind Foster’s critically acclaimed See What You Want To See. “Darrell and Niko are two of the most creative individuals I know,” says Foster. “And we’re like brothers, so we hold nothing back. The trust and freedom that brings to a project is immeasurable.” After listening to the group of songs Foster had written for the record, they decided to do things a little differently. Instead of hiring the same Nashville studio musicians, they called in some friends: Waddy Wachtel and Charley Drayton (members of Keith Richard’s side project, the X-pensive Winos) along with Wallflowers’ keyboardist Rami Jaffe and legendary bassist Bob Glaub (Jackson Browne, C.S&Y, Warren Zevon). “Those guys come by the roots-rock feel pretty honest,” laughs Foster. “I knew they were great musicians, and I figured if I knew the songs well enough upfront, they could just fall in. I wanted to keep it simple. By going to Los Angeles to record, time and money were naturally limited—but it was a good limitation. Sometimes I think we do too much just because we can. Instead, we went in and cut the tracks in two days.” The arrangements were banged out in the studio, and that live, old-school feeling comes across in the tracks. “We didn’t go in with any pre-conceived notions about how each song would sound,” says Foster. ‘We just did what best serves each song.” “It is a very rootsy record, but the title cut is Darrell and me trying our very best to write something like Jimmy Webb or Burt Bacharach would have written in 1968,” Foster continues. “Because I love that stuff! The nice thing about doing a record from an independent perspective is that I get to have songs like ‘This World We Live In’ next to stripped down country-R&B things like ‘New Zip Code’ and roots-rock-meets-Buck Owens things like ‘Big Idea.’” It’s not hard to pick out Foster’s influences; everything from the aforementioned Owens and Webb, to the vintage pop of the Beatles and the truth and grit of Texas troubadours Guy Clark and Townes Van Zandt. Yet while you can hear those ghosts in the grooves, the collection is all Radney Foster.