By Holly Gleason

Whitters never cared about fitting in, preferring to use honesty like a flamethrower. “Ten Year Town” offers the grueling truth of Nashville without flinching or backing down, while “Janice at the Hotel Bar” paints a picture of a grown woman making the best of a less-than-2% life; so much wisdom is strung into her small talk that it holds the song together.

Especially affecting is “All the Cool Girls,” which uses a creeping rhythm track underneath a song that expresses the real truth inside what so many girls who could be the heroine of Tom Petty’s “Free Fallin’” are feeling.

A realist, the girl from Iowa who co-wrote Little Big Town’s “Happy People” delivers The Dream on her own Pigasus Records. This strong blast of ’80s Steve Earle/Rosanne Cash/Patty Loveless-style credibility-country inspired The Washington Post’s Chris Richards to call it “the year’s deepest country album.”