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Can you be a rock star if the voice that is most readily comparable to yours is that of Andy Devine's? Devine, you may recall, was the comic actor with a cracked voice who appeared in a zillion movies and TV shows. Elvin Bishop sounds just like him.

Contrary to Al Kooper's assertion in the liner notes that this music "has amazingly found itself timeless," Super Session is very much tied to its times: 1968. (Being reissued or used in films is not the same as being timeless.) The project brought together members of

Even as a man who, in the past two decades, has produced arguably more landmark records than anyone since Phil Spector, Daniel Lanois is still clearly questioning himself as an artist in his own right. Of course, the sonic attributes on this third collection of his own songs are the

Alone with his grief, trying to find the expressions and tones that would, as the CD sleeve reads, "keep the loss alive and behind me," Portland's Matt Ward painted his masterpiece. Transfiguration Of Vincent, like portions of his second album, 2001's End Of Amnesia,

Caitlin Cary has avoided the sophomore jinx and follows up her stunning 2002 solo debut, While You Weren't Looking, with an even better album. Every song on I'm Staying Out brims with confidence and an undercurrent of joy that makes the listener feel as if Cary

A crude art historian might suggest that creative forms develop along a similar arc: They begin as rudimentary attempts to reproduce a natural account of life, but mature into complex, subjective re-creations of the artist's worldview. So the earliest, simple storytelling paved the way for the formal daring