Everything You Know Is Wrong

David Cook's 'This Loud Morning': Track by track

. Using common language and similar melodic structures throughout the album, he created a collection of songs that relate to each other. You can listen to them individually, of course, but they mean more when they're played together. And, musically, David sticks with his core values: a loud rock approach to pop-sensible ballads and mid-tempo songs and impassioned vocals that slide along the knife's edge of emotion. It's an attitude that may or may not win him new fans but will almost certainly endear him further to the ones that loved him the first time around.

A track-by-track take on This Loud Morning follows.

Circadian (Writers: David Cook, David Hodges, Neal Tiemann). Everything you know is wrong. At least, it might be. Even as it opens with a chiming melodic pattern like that of a disjointed music box, the track David chose to open his new album seems to say that nothing is certain -- and there's nothing to be done about it. Life, relationships, everything, they're all subject to the Three C's of Al-Anon : Didn't cause it, can't control it, can't cure it. David's response, when he keeps caving in as the light pulls him under? "I'm closing my eyes, 'cause once the sun rises it's out of my hands." In other words, it's a good time for a nap.

Right Here, With You (David Cook, Ryan Star, Johnny Rzeznik, Gregg Wattenberg). David loves him a good apocalyptic love song. Here, he sings himself hoarse on a track that seems to add new instruments every couple lines as it builds to an anthem-sized roar "If the sun stops burning and the world stops turning, I'll be right here with you," he sings, and all the music video needs is Bruce Willis and some asteroids, or John Cusack and an airplane.

We Believe (David Cook, David Hodges, Jess Cates, Lindy Robbins). David has expressed nearly everything on this album in terms of an epic struggle: runners stumble at the finish line, the world caves in, stars collapse and blink out. Constant Herculean effort can wear on a person, and here, as the album nears its halfway point (you could think of it as under the noonday heat), David acknowledges that with some encouraging words: "Don't tell me that it's over, even though you're finding it hard to believe." Don't give up, he seems to say; we can get through this, but only if we stick together.

Take Me As I Am (David Cook, Marti Frederiksen, Scott Stevens). For the briefest of moments, this sounds like it's going to be a fairytale love song. "This is ... my happy ever after only if you're here," David sings. He pauses, but that's not the end of the line. It's happy ever after only if you're here "when I'm lost and broken." You remember those falling stars and that breaking ground in the last song? Here, it's as if he's saying, "I'm in for the long haul -- are you?