Queen High

When 36-year-old singer-composer John Hiatt says he couldn't have handled large-scale success before now, you have to believe him. "I was a scared and scary practicing drug addict and alcoholic until August of 1984," he confesses. Not long after he became sober, his wife committed suicide. "Suffice it to say, we were both very sick," he explains. "One of us survived and one of us didn't." Hiatt has since remarried and now lives in Nashville with his three-year-old daughter and nine-year-old stepson. Bring the Family, his latest album, which chronicles his final battles with the bottle, his recovery from his wife's death and his new-found domestic bliss, is also something of a comeback. Hiatt's professional relationships were as rocky as his home life, with a series of on-again, off-again record contracts. "I was quite willing to let my recording career sit for a while," he says of that tumultuous period. It seems as if the only constant in his life has been praise from critics. "Am I a critics' darling?" he chuckles. "If they just had an opportunity to meet me, we could fix that."