Stacey Earle offers a different take on what happens when children reach their majority.

Star rating ***
Stacey Earle offers a different take on what happens when children reach their majority. In her best hillbilly-tellin'-it-straight accent, Earle announces that it was her and her husband, Mark Stuart, who got to leave home. Except it's not so much that they left it behind as brought it with them and are giving a virtual reality tour through their songs.

There's the ragged old suitcase that Earle packed her things in when she was 16 and went looking for whatever she found when she got there - and now sits by the door ominously - and a whole photo album of weddings, barbecues and other memories. They even have some of their favourite records with them, in spirit at least, slipping in George Harrison and Bob Dylan songs between vignettes of family dramas and autobiographical details, both personal and borrowed.

They complement each other well musically, Stuart the cool dude with the schooled-on-the-road guitar playing and richly developed voice, and Earle with her ingenuous honesty, intuitive harmonies and a pick-and-flick guitar style as country as cow pats.

Occasionally their songs of domestic devotion stray a little close to the saccharine. But Stuart's accomplished guitar playing can generally be relied upon to toughen things up, while Earle's down-home twang has steel at its core, especially when she delivers a monologue of a fired-up mother with a son badly injured in military exercises, striding restlessly through the audience all the while. The news turns out to be a mistake but Earle's conviction adds another authentic chapter of life at the Nashville end of Highway 49.