Three years after her last album, Happy?, the double-platinum-selling Jann Arden returns with her most rhythmic record, and also her most emotionally naked. In collaborating with her longtime guitar player Russell Broom, Arden sets her dreamy excursions of love and lust to a stronger pulse, working with drum loops to drive her fiercely erotic and romantic fantasies. It's these songs that carry the album, not the occasional oddity like "Janeen," a warning about a sociopathic lover, or "Another Human Being," a treatise on the horrors of African famine and disease, or even "I Only Wanted Sex," which inadvertently offers the point of view of the guy from Arden's biggest hit, "Insensitive." What's particularly involving about the writing is Arden's us-against-the-world vignettes of deep intimacy ("Sleepless") and her frequent expression of primal needs in alternately adult and infantile fashion ("Cherry Popsicle"). If, as in the stunningly beautiful "In Your Keeping," it's hard to know if she's addressing a parent, a lover, or God, in the end it doesn't matter: This is provocative stuff, fit with wings to take you almost anywhere you want to go. Isn't that what the best music always does? --Alanna Nash