Between the time he was lead guitarist in John Gorka"s college band and the time he launched his own singer-songwriter career, Richard Shindell attended the Union Theological Seminary. The experience didn"t turn him into a preachy true believer but gave him an abiding interest in spiritual matters--an interest that informs his fine album, Reunion Hill. The lead-off track, "The Next Best Western," for example, finds him driving late at night on a Midwestern interstate, wishing he could believe in something as passionately as the fire-breathing preacher on the late-night gospel station seems to. Bolstered by a James Taylor-like melody, the chorus turns into a prayer, "Lord, deliver me, deliver me to the next Best Western." The same skeptical but irrepressible fascination with things spiritual informs most of the other songs as well. When he sings of life "Beyond the Iron Gate," the images are flexible: describing both a literal fence around a country house and a metaphorical fence around a shy, self-doubting man. On "I Saw My Youth Today," an imagined meeting between the singer and his teenage self becomes a real encounter between a raving, middle-aged man and a frightened stranger on the sidewalk. Shindell, who wrote a strong Civil War song on his last release, comes up with another for the title track of this album. The story of "Reunion Hill" is told by a farmwife who remembers all the soldiers who "limped across this field of mine," yet none of them were the husband she had sent off to war. Producer-guitarist Larry Campbell frames all these numbers with sympathetic folk-rock arrangements. --Geoffrey Himes