Country music was in somewhat of a transitional mode in the 1980s, caught between the old Nashville countrypolitan sound, the somewhat garish urban cowboy scene (the movie had opened in 1980) and the slow, underground rise of the so-called new traditionalists, who finally broke into the open as the 1990s began alongside the Garth Brooks juggernaut. One thing that is fad-proof, though, is a good old love song, and this set from Time-Life offers some of the decade's best, including Rosanne Cash's haunting "Seven Year Ache," Ronnie Milsap's deliberately nostalgic "Lost in the Fifties (In the Still of the Night)," and Willie Nelson's brilliantly maudlin "Angel Flying Too Close to the Ground." ~ Steve Leggett