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Simplicity is ravishing. Here's a record that has no liner notes except the statement, "Anyone who tells you they played on this, probably did." The songs are not listed anywhere on the package -- except for the actual CD, which is in the player, which means

Understated but resolutely bluesy, smoldering but bell-clear; there's something timeless about this St. Louis band. One Fell Swoop defies one fell label: their sound is acoustic, hip-swiveling and scorched with twang, but it also celebrates the intimacy of lyrical narratives. The band possesses at least two virtuosos: Steve

Baby boomer balladeer Greg Brown is like one of those friends you had back in school, the one you would always go to for advice because they could look at what seemed a complicated dilemma and extract an obvious answer. Brown's wisdom cuts through the fog with amazing

While comparisons to other artists can be useful to the consumer -- if I see a band described as sounding like "Steve Earle and Paul Westerberg taking turns fronting Los Lobos," chances are I'm going to check their album out --most artists are understandably wary of

If Kelly Hogan is remembered only as the leader of the Jody Grind, fans of contemporary pop music would be the worse for it. The short-lived Atlanta quartet's jazzy tendencies preceded the "cocktail nation" craze by a few years, and as a result pigeonholed Hogan as

So there was Rosanne Cash, chatting about a few of her favorite things on "Four on the Floor" --VH1's now-defunct pop-crit version of "The McLaughlin Group" -- when, suddenly, she rose out of her seat and simultaneously began shaking the seven year ache out