"I always believed in everything-god, magic, myth, truth. I have always been compulsively after the truth," says Janas Hoyt, singer, songwriter and musical leader of Bloomington, Indiana's The Mary Janes. Truth, and the peace it can fashion out of loss and pain, is a theme that runs strong through the band's first album-length effort, Record No. 1. Meticulously produced by Hoyt and beautifully recorded and engineered by Mark Maher and John Strohm, the album is a musical and emotional tour de force that mixes classical string arrangements with, among other things, Carter Family folk, piney woods gospel, and streetwise, Lou Reed-style rock and roll-a unique and improbable mix that is tied together by Hoyt's emotionally driven, but fragile voice and the soaring violin work of Caroline Balfe and Kathy Kolata, who has been with Hoyt in The Mary Janes since the group's inception in 1993.

The songs on this album are carefully built from minimalist, roots-type beginnings, into multi-layered, sonically textured gems that use god, magic and myth to pull the listener in, emotionally, to a point as close to the truth as one can bear to get. Take, for example, "Never Felt Better," a song that begins with a hushed, acoustic guitar and Hoyt, sounding like a late-night Patsy Cline, telling us, "I buckled my bows, tied off my debts, / I howled at the moon, smoked chain cigarettes. / I cut out my heart, spit it into the fire-watched the steam rise and rain down like desire . . . and"-with a hint of surprise in her voice-"I never felt better." A pause, then, with new-found assurance-"I never felt better!"

At the last moment, without notifying Hoyt or The Mary Janes, Nashville's Delmore Records changed the sequencing on this recording before releasing it. With some discs, it might not much matter; however, this album is not just a collection of songs that could be shuffled about. It is constructed as carefully as a piece of classical music; therefore, this unauthorized re-sequencing was bound to cause havoc with the overall musical and emotional design of the recording. Fortunately, the digital age brings with it the ability to reprogram a disc, so Record No. 1 can be heard as Hoyt planned if re-sequenced at home in the following order: "Wish I Could Fly"; "Throwing Pennies"; "She Flies Away"; "Never Felt Better"; "Sigh to Signal"; "Part of Me Now"; "Final Days"; "What a Friend"; "Shooting Star." This review assumes Hoyt's original sequencing in discussing the emotional and artistic strengths of this recording.

"Wish I Could Fly," the intended album opener, kicks things off on a bright pop note-a pretty folk figure is picked out on electric guitar to set the tone; then Hoyt sings, in a childishly perky voice, "Wish I could fly on an air-o-plane. . . doo, doo, doo, doo . . . ." But, by the end of the verse, we see this as the bravado is really is, as true vulnerability breaks through: "My world has lost its light without you. / I could die of fright without you here." As the song progresses, the singer moves closer to her truth, and with it comes a degree of self-assurance and emotional confidence lacking at the beginning. This complex shift in tone is both echoed and extended by the grand, classically influenced violin solo taken by Balfe, and nailed by the assertive "A-ha" Hoyt uses to close the song.

"Throwing Pennies" picks up musically on the same note "Fly" closes on-but here the sound of the streets takes over as The Mary Janes' rhythm section punches in a slow Lou Reed-type strut-somewhere between "Sweet Jane" and "Waitin' for the Man." The singer, more self-assured now, taps into the wisdom of the I Ching, throwing pennies, in stead of yarrow sticks, whose pattern reveals that what is done by one is felt by all. She cautions her love, "You take it in / . . . You never know, baby, . . . / What it will show you." With lyrics half buried in the beat, she tells him he's "throwin' pennies, throwin' stones . . . / When you take it out on yourself, you take it out on everybody else," as violins soar above the song's dark beat, then curl down to join it, adding brightness, sparkle and some degree of emotional thoughtfulness as they weave out their instrumental coda.

Having gained self-confidence and a certain emotional distance from which to view truths about her lover, the singer enters "She Flies Away," with an upbeat harmonica figure chasing her voice. The seemingly innocent and peppy dance tune propels Hoyt as narrator as she tells the story: "She would sell her ring, and it didn't mean a thing / . . . She had a husband and a home. / She stands alone, but it's alright . . . / She flies away." Such newfound independence can be terrifying, but liberating at the same time. In the next cut, "Never Felt Better," the singer learns this, "howling at the moon," and realizing-with some degree of pleasure and surprise-that she "never felt better."

The urgent rhythms of "Sigh to Signal," flecked with hints of 1950s r&b harp work, push the singer forward in a new, more emotionally mature relationship: "I'm diggin' a hole to bury these words, / But I feel like laughin' out loud," she sings, as love and desire come together, twining in the dark-"hear to heart, soul to soul, sigh to signal . . . ." Yet even at this new level of emotional awareness, love can cut like a knife. As "Part of Me Now" opens, a sad violin wavers in the background, and the singer whispers tearfully, "Don't go." A drum kicks in, with a slow, inevitably hard beat, and the singer sighs, emotionally desolate, and repeats: "Don't go," finally whispering, "Stay with me now," as violins pick up the chord changes, building texture and emotion until, suddenly, the song is rock and roll wail with drums an dual electric lead guitars and Hoyt riding this emotion with an urgent Patti Smith-type vocal: "If it takes all night . . . I'll show it to you . . . / You're part of me now."

The raw, emotional urgency of rock and roll is followed in "Final Days" with the quieter pain of loss and its implications on a far more complex level than the singer was capable of understanding at the beginning of this musical journey. Rich acoustic guitar tones lead into this stately, almost hymn-like song, in which the singer-barely able to control her anxiety and pain-uses a Rickie Lee Jones-type sad, little girl voice to chant, "I can't find you, I can't find you . . . ," then, voice cracking with emotion and the finality of her loss, "And you're all gone, And you're all gone. . . / I want to know are these the final days?"

As she moves to accept this devastating loss, the singer is forced to confront the truth, emotionally. Balfe's violin quietly caresses her voice as the singer leaves the baffled little girl's voice, a place to which she had retreated, behind as she sings, "We may not always have tomorrow / And time's not something you can borrow. . . . / I guess I'll try to make my life a place I can always find / A place I can always go." The band kicks in, loosening angry, roiling feedback, like thunder, through which the singer wails, "Time's not really on your side. / Hey, love, /Another man is gone." Then, like thunder, the feedback rumbles and fades, leaving the lone, acoustic guitar that began the piece to close things with a note of quiet, thoughtful benediction.

Silence.

Then, with the pops and scratches of an old 78 record, we hear the traditional hymn "What a Friend We Have in Jesus," the words of hope burnished to a soft glow by the achingly pure tones of Dennis Scoville's steel guitar. And yet, something's wrong here. The singers are distanced, echoed. It's like hearing the hynm from outside the church or down the halls of time. Hope may be alive inside, but as an outsider in the cold, is it really possible to "take everything to God in prayer" as this old-timey recording once suggested?

With these though questions raised, the final cut, the magnificent "Shooting Star," wisely does not attempt answers, yet suggests the attainability of some sort of emotional peace-an acceptance that god, magic, myth and truth, however painful they may be, can bring. The nearly eight-minute long song begins with a quiet electric guitar figure as Hoyt dreamily sings, "All of our old days fall away, they fall away . . . " A strong, simple rhythm is joined by violins and piano, waving the melody into more and more complex textures. "Shooting star . . . a blaze of light, / I been burned by it before." The song builds, layer upon layer, strings playing counterpoint, buried vocals swelling from the mix, the piano painting delicate colors over the top of this classical/Phil Spectorish wall of sound, while the singer's voice, now a wordless and mystical chant of breathy emotion, merges with the musical textures surrounding it-only to be left, as the song finally fades to still darkness, as the only sound left in this emotional musical universe.

"Art is thinking with the senses," Hoyt says. "I think we are all influenced by everything that we perceive. My only criterion is that it must be honest." "Shooting Star" and the entire song cycle of Record No. 1 is as painfully honest as music can get-yet it is also glorious in its emotional and musical texturing and shading, and stunningly original in its combinations of musical forms and styles. "I am drawn to artists who create exceptionally close to the bone, their productions ringing with human experience," Hoyt says. With Record No. 1, she and The Mary Janes have created just such a work themselves.