Friday, October 27, 2006; WE12

MADELEINE PEYROUX"Half the Perfect World"Rounder

"(LOOKING FOR) THE HEART of Saturday Night" is the Tom Waits tune most often recorded by other singers, but no one has ever sung it as Madeleine Peyroux does on her new album, "Half the Perfect World." Most interpreters assume that Saturday night has to be cracked open like a walnut, and they bang into the song as if they were bouncing off every street lamp on the block. Peyroux, by contrast, assumes that the weekend's secrets are best revealed by dissolving their sugar casing in the liquid warmth of a breathy mezzo-soprano, drawn-out phrasing and a muted trumpet.

Peyroux doesn't have a big or showy voice, but her phrasing and tone are so personal that she turns familiar songs inside out, forcing you to consider that the goal of Saturday night might not be an adrenaline buzz but rather a post-coital calm. When she sings Fred Neil's "Everybody's Talkin'," she drifts away from her rhythm section's swing as if zoning out from the chatter around her. She doesn't abandon tempo; she simply substitutes her own pulse for the one expected. When she and k.d. lang duet on Joni Mitchell's "River," Peyroux's voice seems to skate away down a frozen Canadian waterway, just as the lyrics prescribe.

Mitchell's ex-husband, Larry Klein, produced "Half the Perfect World" with much the same band he used on Peyroux's 2004 breakout smash, "Careless Love." Yet the new disc is a definite leap forward from its predecessor. The four songs that Peyroux co-wrote with Klein, Steely Dan's Walter Becker or Norah Jones's Jesse Harris are better structured, verbally and musically, than her earlier originals. And though it may seem paradoxical to claim that such an understated singer sounds more confident and authoritative, that's just what happens when she relaxes every muscle in a song without ever seeming sloppy or arbitrary.

-- Geoffrey Himes

Appearing Friday at Lisner Auditorium.