While the dusty Texas landscape hardly seems like fertile soil, it nonetheless produces more singer/songwriters per acre than any state besides Massachusetts. The difficulty is to stand out in the crowd. Terri Hendrix makes her latest effort to stand out on The Ring, a 40-minute foray into love, relationships, and intergalactic space travel. A bouncy acoustic arrangement gets things off to a good start on “Goodbye Charlie Brown,” a song that expresses hope in the face of the millennium and all the fears that came with it. This tune, along with “Spinning Off” and “Truth Is Strange,” features Hendrix’s attractive and confident vocals against a rich musical backdrop. While these songs work well, the material also calls to mind a number of other singer/songwriters. On a track like “From Another Planet,” however, with a barrage of words and a jazzy structure, and “Nightwolves,” with its half-sung, half-spoken lyric, she offers something completely different. In fact, on “From Another Planet” Hendrix comes into her own, presenting an exciting, in-your-face vocal with a fun lyric. Even on the somewhat-predictable country romp “I Found the Lions,” Hendrix uses a word rap in the middle of song to transform the piece into something original. Even when she doesn’t throw in a little something extra, good taste dominates the arrangements and production, creating a good-sounding album. With its tuneful songs and distinctive elements, The Ring should make Hendrix conspicuous among her Texas peers. – Ronnie D. Lankford, Jr.