In Brief

* * * Shawn Colvin, “Cover Girl,” Columbia. On her first album of solely outside material, Colvin tends to make bittersweet ballads (Tom Waits’ “The Heart of Saturday Night” and David Byrne’s “Naive Melody”) sweet, and sweet numbers (Sting’s “Every Little Thing (He) Does Is Magic”) sweeter. If a sense of revelation is your standard of successful song interpretation, this might not cut it. But sometimes, as here, dulcet is just dandy enough.

New albums are rated on a scale of one star (poor) to four (excellent).