Love Has Got Me is an apt title for this collection, since its content is a torrent of celebration and includes practically every pop style extant. Wendy Waldman, a 22-year-old Southern Californian who has written more than 150 songs, makes music that doesn't so much exemplify these styles as synthesize them with grace and fluency. In addition to singing, she plays piano, guitar and dulcimer. Her vocal quality is reminiscent of Laura Nyro's, although lighter and less affected. She takes the rock bottom bass lines that comprise the skeletal foundations of many of her songs from the blues. And she borrows from Joni Mitchell, although, as in the other cases, she treats the source as but another approach at her disposal.

No one of her 12 original songs is like any other. Many are apparently autobiographical, dealing directly with her own ups and downs in love, almost always with philosophic maturity and good humor, and it is her special gift and good fortune that she can turn everything she touches into a legitimate area of personal creation.

The structures of Waldman's songs adhere to contemporary form. Most are short and have the flow and "rightness" that is the hallmark of the finest and most durable tunesmiths. Add to this her compelling lyrics, whose underlying theme is a vividly imagined spiritual restlessness, and you have the singer-songwriter debut of the year.

Due credit for the success of Love Has Got Me must go to producer Charles Plotkin, whose only previous production was Steve Ferguson's unjustly ignored debut album on Asylum earlier this year. For Wendy Waldman he has provided a satisfying, understated setting, one that allows the artist and her material to shine. Each cut begins simply, with Waldman backing herself on either piano or guitar. Various elements -- electric guitar, backup vocals, scaled-down strings and, most importantly, excellent brass arrangements -- gradually accrue, lending each song its aura of self-contained inevitability. Sidemen for the album include Jim Horn (brass), Russ Kunkel (drums) and Wilton Felder (bass). Among the guest backup vocalists are Maria Muldaur (who recorded two of Wendy's songs on her extraordinary solo debut Maria Muldaur), Linda Ronstadt, Greg Prestopino and Jennifer Warren.

The album opens with "Train Song," a hypnotic fantasy in which romantic and spiritual freedom are equated with riding a train in the morning sun. A nice organ-guitar arrangement balanced equally against background vocals creates a delicate yet relentless momentum above which Waldman sings the song's pictorial refrain: "You. can see them chase their hats as the train passes by." "Thinking Of You" is a tender lullaby-reminiscence of an old love. A soft string arrangement punctuated by hard triplet piano chords builds toward a powerful emotional climax. "Gringo En Mexico" is an ingratiating Latin-flavored song that celebrates being happy and carefree on the Mexican seacoast: The track becomes even more ecstatic as the lyrics change from English to Spanish. The beautiful "Horse Dream," a night vision delivered with a strong gospel fervor, has Waldman singing to only her own piano accompaniment.

Then the bluesy "Can't Come In" provides a perfect change of pace. Opening with chunky acoustic guitar chords that recall the intro to Joni Mitchell's "Cold Blue Steel and Sweet Fire," the cut abruptly segues into a harder, meaner sound as Waldman enacts her desperately painful rejection of a still-attractive lover who has hurt her too many times in the past to be given another chance. Toward the end, a triumphant brass choir comes up front to confirm the lady's resolution. The side closes with the beautiful "Pirate Ships," another magical lullaby, this one sung to a child with a simple arrangement featuring piano, light strings and laid-back vocals.

"Old Time Love," which opens side two, is probably the album's strongest candidate for a hit single. It is a moving tribute to the imaginative power of music, specifically old records:

Well you come to me on the record player
Let me start it from the first side again
'Cause it sounds so fine to me
Are you just a storyteller
Telling stories just to kill your own pen
But it sounds so fine to me . . .

"Vaudeville Man" follows and, unlike Maria Muldaur's gutsier, Dixieland interpretation, Waldman's is more soulful and tentative at the outset, then accumulates a strutting confidence as recollection gives way to rollicking affirmation. "Natural Born Fool'' is a happy-go-lucky expression of the feeling of being a temporary loser, unable to cope with anything, while "Waiting for the Rain" is an ethereal torch song with strong echoes of "Willow Weep for Me."

The title cut, which concludes the album, sums up everything that Wendy Waldman is about. Here she proclaims that with the passage of time, the quality of love changes in unforeseeable ways; that sustained commitment to a lover is difficult; and finally that the question of whether two people really "know" each other is ever-recurrent in an intimate relationship. One of the ways Waldman accomplishes all this is to wring contradictory lyric changes on a single line: `'Well love can blind you, this I know / If love has found you, you better let it go / Well love has got me / this I know." The song is Waldman's ultimate expression of self-acceptance and positive belief. By the time it ends, her music has got me, and I'm not about to let it go.