There's a fine line between inspiration and imitation, and no one knows it better than Mike Ireland. "For better or for worse," he says, "what I'm drawn to is 70s country, and lots of 70s pop singles. That's what was on pop radio back when I was a kid, and the way that music was put together is imprinted on my brain. But I don't want to be a tribute band; I want to be a band that plays now, but also knows where the roots of it came from and tries to pull that into the present."

On Try Again, his long-awaited second album, Ireland and his band Holler do just that. It's a stunning collection that, like their acclaimed 1998 debut, rings a dozen changes on the combination of emotional directness and musical elegance that characterized the classic works of artists like Charlie Rich, George Jones, Loretta Lynn, Merle Haggard and other artists from country's 1970s heyday. "His songs… succeed in transforming one man's heartbreak into a universal human experience," the Nashville Scene's Michael McCall wrote of Learning How To Live, crisply linking Ireland's work to the quintessential country tradition, and if there's less heartbreak and more hope to be found on Try Again, the insight is no less applicable. "The sense of tradition kind of reminds you these are not new themes," Ireland notes. "These are things that we've always been talking about, things that have troubled everybody forever. Details change, but our concerns don't."

For Ireland, though, those details can make all the difference, at least when it comes to the way a song is translated from idea into performance. Try Again's music captures the flavor of a period when great producers like Billy Sherrill (George Jones, Tammy Wynette, Charlie Rich) were creating works that married country essentialisms with rhythm and blues, pop and rock and roll influences through a meticulous attention to the little things. "When I listen to those things," Mike says, "everybody's not just wailing away. Everybody's doing very specific things, and they may only be playing every two bars or four bars, some little tiny piece, but that piece fits in. There's always little things that you can hum along with - all these interlocking pieces, and all of them were memorable. So that's what we tried to do."

Ireland's attention to such specifics comes naturally. Born and raised in Kansas City, Missouri, music was a part of life from his earliest days. "We had music in our house ever since I was a little baby," he recalls. "My mom played the piano and my dad played electric guitar. He played occasionally, but my mom played all the time. We'd go to bed and she'd go downstairs and sit up playing things on the piano. I have really great memories of how it would waft up the stairs."

As he grew older, Mike took up the alto saxophone and earned his undergraduate degree in music education. At the same time, he moved in another direction, joining some friends in a rock band and learning the electric bass. "I had two weeks to do it before my first gig," he laughs, but the job was done. More importantly, the core of the band held together for a decade as the Starkweathers, described by critic David Cantwell as "half Johnny Cash, half Clash."

By the mid-90s, the Starkweathers appeared poised to move onto the national stage, but Ireland's life took a sudden turn when he discovered that his wife had been having an affair with the band's lead singer. "Suddenly I was without a wife or a house or a band or a job or a best friend," Ireland told No Depression magazine in 1998. Yet as disastrous as the experience was, it also proved to open a new musical road for the singer and songwriter. Within months, a flood of songs began to emerge, different not only from the Starkweathers' music but from almost anyone else's on the contemporary scene. Together with a couple of well-selected covers, they formed the heart of Learning How To Live and embodied the transformative magic described by McCall.

The album, backed by exhaustive touring with Holler and as a duo with Holler acoustic guitarist/harmony vocalist Dan Mesh (the band's lone holdover on Try Again) won Ireland an enthusiastic following that included both "alternative country" fans and influential country music figures like country music historian Bill C. Malone (who contributes liner notes to the new CD) and Grand Ole Opry manager Pete Fisher. Mike's 1999 Opry debut was highlighted in the Journal Of Country Music as emblematic of the fresh sounds Fisher has brought to the Opry - though, Ireland laughs, "it was so thrilling that it was all just a blur. But everybody was so nice, it was like they were your friends." His subsequent returns - he's appeared a half-dozen times since - testify to the appreciation his music has earned at country's most esteemed venue.

Try Again is sure to elicit the same kind of response. Holler's lineup - Ireland, Mesh and St. Louis veterans Spencer Marquart (drums) and John Horton (guitar) - is new, but in the studio it meshed perfectly with producer/engineer/keyboards player Michael Deming (Beachwood Sparks, Lilys, Apples In Stereo) and legendary strings arranger/conductor Jerry Yester, both of whom contributed to Learning How To Live, as well as country-rock pedal steel guitar stalwart Buddy Cage (New Riders Of The Purple Sage, Bob Dylan, Ian & Sylvia). Steeped in tradition yet inspired enough to recombine familiar gestures in fresh, illuminating ways, they formed the ideal creative team to give musical life to Ireland's vision.

"It's about how hard it is to love, and especially how hard it is to love the second and third and fourth times around,"Mike says of the album. "It becomes harder to love when you know what is possible. I see the record as moving from somebody who's hurt and protecting themselves and pretty much dwelling in the past at the beginning to someone who's willing to open up and be vulnerable, willing to get hurt again, knowing that's exactly how it might happen - that's probably how it will happen. It's about finding faith."

In a dozen tunes - all originals except for a long-time staple of live shows, Charlie Rich's "Life Has Its Little Ups And Downs" - Ireland explores these themes, drawing on all the musical riches of his beloved countrypolitan classics. Yet despite its sophisticated echoes of the past, Try Again's deepest fidelity to tradition lies in its emotional honesty, uncluttered sound and unerring sense of how lyric depth can be served by just the right musical touches. From the electric sitar that colors "Close Enough To Break Each Others' Hearts" to the spare, steel-tinged country-rock of "Welcome Back" and the Nashville-meets-Memphis cross-fertilization of "Mister Rain," Mike Ireland and Holler make the familiar seem new again in a way that provides both pleasure for the ear and nourishment for the heart.