PICK SIX.(The Talk of the Town)(Richard Thompson's performances)

In 1999, Playboy asked the grudging guitar hero, prolific songwriter, and self-described "folk dinosaur" Richard Thompson to name his ten favorite popular songs of "the millennium." Feeling mischievous, he submitted a list that began in 1050 and included such hits as the thirteenth-century round "Sumer Is Icumen In." Thompson never did hear back from Playboy, but a year later he came up with the notion of performing these and other super-oldies. He called the show "1,000 Years of Popular Music," and covered everything from Orazio Vecchi to Britney Spears, with a little Gilbert and Sullivan along the way. "I wouldn't say it's our forte, but it goes down surprisingly well," Thompson said recently. "I mean, the sheer nerve of tackling light opera."

Thompson was standing in an aisle of the Virgin Megastore in Union Square, having been badgered into performing another curatorial stunt, a browse-and-buy session. Pick six disks, any six. And talk, please. It is almost as great a pleasure to hear Richard Thompson talk as it is to hear him play "The Mikado" on the guitar, but because he mumbles and stammers a bit, speaks quickly, dryly, and Englishly, and, in this instance, had to do so over the din of South Asian house music, you got the impression that the pleasure wasn't entirely his. In black cargo shorts, a black short-sleeved shirt, and an Adidas ball cap, he wandered through the rock-and-pop section, sourly appraising the "M"s. "Richard Marx. Joni Mitchell--well, we don't want to be too obvious. Motorhead." He looked out over the ridges and valleys of recorded music. "Let's go to another section."

After a brief stop in the gospel department ("This is white stuff," Thompson said. "What do white people know about gospel, anyway?"), he found himself amid even whiter stuff, staring at a prodigious selection of his own music, from his days, in the sixties and seventies, with Fairport Convention and with his ex-wife Linda. Folk. "I've got so much coming out this year it's kind of strange," he said. He started to enumerate--a new record called "Front Parlour Ballads," a movie soundtrack, a boxed set, and three DVDs, including one of "1,000 Years of Popular Music"--and then exclaimed, "Whoa! Rat!"

Yes, a record-store rat, about the size of a wah-wah pedal. The rat disappeared under the blues section, and Thompson followed it to a Willie Dixon compilation. "Buy this one," he said. "I got invited to his seventy-fifth-birthday party, and I asked him, 'What are you up to?' And he said, 'I'm making a record.' 'That's great. Have you written all the songs?' He said, 'I've got two thousand unrecorded songs.' Gulp. Here I was thinking I was quite prolific."

He moved down the aisle. He handed over the next selection with a say-no-more nod: "The Chronological Little Miss Cornshucks, 1947-1951."

"Am I familiar with this and I just don't know it?" a fellow-browser asked.

"No," Thompson said. "I don't think you are." (Post-purchase research revealed that Little Miss Cornshucks was a blues ...