Faith Hill

Garth Brooks, the dominant commercial figure in pop music during the 1990s, was named artist of the decade by the Academy of Country Music Wednesday, but 1998 was a year for the women: Faith Hill and the Dixie Chicks combined for seven victories at the academy's 34th annual awards show at the Universal Amphitheatre. Brooks' honor was a foregone conclusion.

Faith Hill, the onetime country thrush from tiny Star, Miss., is not only ready to join the Whitneys and Celines of the broader pop music world. On Saturday at the Greek Theatre, on her first headlining tour, she threw down a gauntlet at the Streisands too. A new ballad she offered from her next album had the hallmarks of a Broadway show stopper--and is about as far as imaginable from the catchy country-pop she launched her career with six years ago.

Faith Hill is the last person many country insiders expected to be going into next week's Academy of Country Music Awards ceremony with the most nominations. Country's leading young belle through the mid-1990s, she de-escalated her career in 1996 to marry fellow country star Tim McGraw and start a family. By the time she was ready to reenter the arena last year, much had changed, and many observers wondered if she would be able to still compete on a mega-star level.

Country singer Faith Hill's music is more torch than twang, aimed squarely at the middle of the road. She's comfortable there, performing smooth romantic balladry with an approach that is usually too slick to ever cut very deep. Which is a shame. At the Thousand Oaks Civic Arts Plaza on Sunday, Hill demonstrated enough energy and vocal chops to tackle a broad range of musical possibilities, if she only would try.

Garth Brooks won his fifth top entertainer trophy from the Academy of Country Music, but Wednesday's three-hour awards show clearly belonged to sweethearts Tim McGraw and Faith Hill, whose romantic "It's Your Love" got top song, single, video and vocal event honors. "Thank you for a wonderful ride," Brooks told the Universal Amphitheatre crowd and national television audience. "Oooh! Where's the party at?"

Tim McGraw stomped onto the Universal Amphitheatre stage on Tuesday like some kind of country-music outlaw, wearing a big black hat and singing "I'm a renegade. . . . " It was not a moment meant to be truly dangerous, in the way Johnny Cash might sing of shooting someone "just to watch him die." McGraw and opening act Faith Hill were less interested in moving country music in challenging new directions than they were in being the perfect hosts.

Ask country singer Faith Hill whether she's ever been petrified during her dizzying ascent to stardom in the last year, and she starts rattling off a list. "The first show I had with Reba; the first time I was on David Letterman; the CMA awards; the . . . " But that same list leads her to conclude: "I've had a pretty awesome year. I don't think it could have been any better myself." Perhaps not. The 27-year-old singer's debut album, "Take Me as I Am," released late last year, has yielded two No.

It's a wonder country singer Faith Hill's debut album, "Take Me as I Am," didn't turn out to be a collection of tear-drenched laments. The 26-year-old Mississippi native admits having a bad case of the blues while recording it. "I was going through a divorce and I wasn't too happy a lot of the time," says Hill. "So the sad songs may be a little sadder. But I didn't want to do one of those typical country albums full of crying about lost loves."