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The wanly jubilant “Baby, You’re the One” leads directly to “What will we do when the money runs out?” “Don’t String Me Along” generates “Say It Isn’t So.” “Dreaming’s Killing Me,” she knows it, only then it’s “Thank God for the wine/That made me lose my mind” and also “loosened up his tongue.” The finale is a love duet with her producer in which she proposes they “leave the world behind.” It’ll never work out. After declaring abject loneliness in the title tune-”If you want to take a walk downtown/I’d be happy just to move my legs around/We don’t have to say a word, but then again/We could just make comments now and then”-she makes a principle of dashing her own hopes, song by song. T he Maudlin Years? Sad Girl? Here’s where she gets really bereft. On both I wish I knew what he was trying to tell his world. On both I love the sour two-man sax sections and crudely insistent rhythms. These muscular early recordings from 1972 or so, a/k/a Éthiopiques 6, sound rougher but no less fevered and distinct than the circa-1975 stuff collected on his certified classic Ere Mela Mela. A MINUSįull-voiced and emotional, the strong Middle Eastern cast of his delivery evoking soul shout as well, Ahmed is the biggest singing star Ethiopia has produced, a young comer who negotiated the insane political particularities of his ancient land to become a respected pro. But it admits sentiment, hold the hygiene, and suggests that he knows more about love dying than he did when he was immortal. Everyone who says this isn’t a sentimental record is right. Only by hearing them can you grasp their tenderness, or understand that the absolute Spanish one seems to be for the wife he left behind, or muse that while the finale addresses his current succor provider, it also reaches out to the rest of us. “I’m looking for a woman with low self-esteem” is how he sums up the succor he craves, and he finishes off a painful “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” with impatient cries of “Open up, open up, open up.” But “El Amor de Mi Vida,” “She’s Too Good for Me,” “Please Stay,” and “Keep Me in Your Heart” mean what their titles say. Naturally he fends off death-the-fact the way he fended off death-the-theme-with black humor. I note disdainfully that her first CDR-gone-legit had better homemade music and no one noticed, I warn that the simultaneously released Knock-Knock Who? is as insular as boors will think this one is, I insist that these are major songs, and I hope she’s just getting started. There’s a song about small-town hell and a song about alcoholic hell and a song about how cool it is not wanting to be cool, and then the invention wears down a bit. “The air is filled with computers and carpets/Skin and bones and telephones and file cabinets,” she whispers dreamily in the anthrax-nightmare fifth. “This isn’t a come-on, but come on, let’s face it/The come on your face is really just mayonnaise,” she singsongs flatly in the hooked-on-phonics second. Mommy and Daddy, your baby is grown,” she overtaxes her child-soprano to proclaim at the end of the first song.