Sam Phillips, The Indescribable Wow.(Sound Recording Review)

Sam Phillips, The Indescribable Wow (Virgin)

This 1988 offering was Sam's second post-Christian offering and showcases why her songwriting and hubby T-Bone Burnett's production clicked from the beginning. While all ten songs are fabulous, the one I heard on RP, "Holding on to the Earth," makes the CD compulsory.

Eels, Shootenanny! (Dreamworks)

Back to being a solo performer, E (or Mark Oliver Everett) continues to craft songs with wicked humor ("I like a girl with a dirty mouth/Someone I can believe"--"Dirty Girl"), smart melodies, and ferocious energy. Shootenanny! doesn't disappoint. At some point, he's going to break through. You read it here first.

The List, Part 2. Well, I still browse record stores. Don't you? Hey, get out there before the paradigm shift is forced on all of us, and the best sound quality will be MP3/128k over a broadband connection. The uneven nature of the discs gleaned out of singles heard on RP is testament enough to coax me toward the iTune model. But once we move permanently, more or less, to the idea of one song at a time, what happens to the very idea of multiple song sets, albums? For every disc I've brought home that's bombed, I've brought home many, many more that have yielded delightfully refreshing surprises--songs that were not on the radio but made the disc all the more gratifying.

Think of when you bought Steely Dan's Can't Buy a Thrill on the basis of "Do It Again" and "Reelin' In The Years," the two cuts you were likely to have heard on the radio. If you'd bought only the two hits via iTunes, you'd ...