This came out in 2001 – or at least that’s when I got it. Here’s what I said about it back then (with some minor editing):
Sunny came home, all right. And then she had a baby. In the five years since Shawn Colvin’s A Few Small Repairs album spawned her Grammy-winning single, the Austin singer-songwriter has indeed returned to the roost. And then she got married and become a mommy, two events that dominate her new album Whole New You.
You can just look at song titles like Nothing Like You, Bound to You and the title track to see that Colvin’s no longer an angry young woman or a self-centred single-gal scenester. Musically, though, she hasn’t changed all that much. These 11 songs still ring with winsome melodies, chime with her folksy guitar lines and sway along to easy, breezy rhythms. Sure, there are a few edgier moments — Bonefields and Another Plane Went Down explore some darker terrain and Bound to You is a Sheryl Crow-ish roots-popper (or at least as close as Colvin gets to one). In the main, though, most of Whole New You sounds like it was written by a woman trying not to wake the baby.
