"This isn't so much a departure as it is me getting back to who I really am," Linda Eder says of her new album The Other Side of Me, on which the celebrated vocal icon undergoes an unexpected stylistic reinvention to deliver one of the most compelling musical statements of her long and storied career. Eder has long been established as one of America's premier singers of pop standards and Broadway tunes, with a large and passionately devoted audience that's embraced her memorable albums and her dramatic live concerts. While many established artists might, at this point in their careers, feel the temptation to coast on past achievements, Eder embraces an exciting new set of creative challenges on The Other Side of Me, her tenth album and her Verve debut. As its title suggests, The Other Side of Me finds the artist trading her established musical approach for a looser, more intimate country-pop sound that's perfectly suited to the thoughtful, introspective songs that she's chosen for the project. "This is really me getting back to my natural musical self, the person I was before Judy Garland and Barbra Streisand came into my life and I went the Broadway route," Eder asserts. "This is the kind of music that moved me as a kid, when I first started playing my guitar and learning how to write songs, so it's a natural direction for me. "I still love the Broadway stuff," she adds, "and I don't ever intend to stop singing it. It's given me a wonderful life and a great career, and I still enjoy that music tremendously. But with those songs, it's more about playing a role, rather than being yourself. The standards call for you to be elegant, but I'm basically a blue-collar farm girl at heart. So when I'm standing up there in a gown, it's a bit like putting on a role for me. There's nothing wrong with that, and I enjoy it and I'm good at it, but it's not quite me. These new songs, and this approach to singing, is a lot more natural—and so much fun—for me." The artist's new approach yields rewarding results on such personally-charged, melodically fetching numbers as "Pieces," "If I Could," "Make Today Beautiful" and Eder's own composition "Waiting for the Fall," which tackle complex emotional issues with insight and intensity. Elsewhere on the album, Eder delivers sensitive readings of Joni Mitchell's classic "Both Sides Now" and "Ghost," by Emily Saliers of the Indigo Girls. Eder co-produced and co-arranged The Other Side of Me with songwriter/keyboardist Billy Jay Stein, a longtime friend who'd previously played keyboards in Eder's touring band. "Billy and I spent a year and a half at his studio making this album, putting it together bit by bit by bit," Eder says. "It was a great collaboration, and it was a pure pleasure the whole way. I had co-produced my records in the past, but this is the first time that I really felt like I was in control. It's really an album that I've been waiting my whole life to make." Indeed, in many ways, The Other Side of Me harkens back to Eder's earliest musical roots. Born to immigrant parents in Tucson, Arizona and raised in Brainerd, Minnesota, she learned to play piano and guitar during childhood, and embraced songwriting as a vehicle for self-expression in her teens. She even won a local beauty pageant at age 18, performing one of her original compositions in the contest's talent competition.