Sam Phillips, The Indescribable Wow.

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 have missed out on "Dirty Work,", "Midnite Cruiser," "Turn That Heartbeat Over Again," and all the rest. Oh, I suppose the really adventurous would peek, indeed risk an additional investment, into something other than the hit offered on iTunes (--or whatever, it's the paradigm that's important), but given the choice, how many would really opt for the unknown? The real unknown is how consumers will behave.

The sales concept of one song at a time will also change record company behavior. First, they'll cut out the middlemen, both the distributors and the retailers, now superfluous expenses. Second, there will be no need to invest in higher resolution recording equipment, because MP3 will mask 7 of every 8 data elements, and the product will still sound better than radio. And since most folks can't tell the difference between CD quality and MP3, the notion of "CD quality" sound, so often dismissed by the audiosnobs, will soon be an artifact of history. Third, once the record companies have "the" song, there will be no need to invest further in an artist: no promotional tours, product marketing, or necessarily further recording. One and done, until they need the next song. Will all these savings result in any reduction in product price, now roughly a buck a pop, to the consumer? Nah.

Record retailers are in trouble. That means CDs are in trouble. Forget SACD and DVD-A, elitist applications fighting against massive democratization. My guess is that your local CD hut disappears in a decade or less, overtaken by the iTune paradigm. Get 'em while you can.