On Real Gone, Tom Waits walks a fraying tightrope. By utterly eliminating one of the cornerstone elements of his sound - keyboards - he has also removed his safety net. With songwriting and production partner Kathleen Brennan, he strips away almost everything conventional from these songs, taking them down to the essences of skeletal rhythms, blasted and guttural blues, razor-cut rural folk music, and the rusty-edge poetry and craft of songwriting itself. His cast includes guitarists Marc Ribot and Harry Cody, bassist/guitarist Larry Taylor, bassist Les Claypool, and percussionists Brain and Casey Waits (Tom's son), the latter of whom also doubles on turntables. This does present problems, such as on the confrontational opener, "Top of the Hill." Waits uses his growling, grunting vocal atop Ribot's monotonously funky single-line riff and Casey's turntables to become a human beatbox offering ridiculously nonsensical lyrics…

"No Secrets," with its iconic cover image, is Carly Simon's third studio album and her first #1. Released in 1972, the record spent five weeks at the top of the Billboard charts. "No Secrets" blends the best of her pop/jazz/bluesy style and spawned four Top 20 hits including the #1 smash "You're So Vain," her powerhouse diatribe to a smug, conceited ex, featuring the back-up vocals of Mick Jagger. "The Right Thing to Do" was another major single, and one of her most gorgeous ballads ever. No one can mistake that voice, which has become one of the most recognizable and endearing in all of pop music. Richard Perry's simple, elegant production pays particular attention to the vocals that run the gamut of sweet to ferocious. It seems Carly Simon knows, intuitively, how to properly emote the feelings of each song to the listener…

Tom Waits’ Glitter and Doom Live doesn't fall into the various traps that many other concert recordings do, though it does have its problems. This double-disc set marks his third live effort in his nearly 40-year career, each one summing up his career to the point of its release. The first, Nighthawks at the Diner, issued in 1975 on Asylum, is regarded by many as one of the greatest live albums of all time. Big Time, released during his tenure at Island in 1986, is hotly debated in fan circles. It is likely that Glitter and Doom Live will be too, but for different reasons. The musical performances here were culled from Waits’ historic sold-out tour of the U.S. and Europe. He compiled and sequenced the tracks himself, intending to make them sound like a single show…

On An Evening of New York Songs and Stories, Vega revisits some of the most iconic songs in her repertoire as well as more hidden gems in a stunning live recording on which she is backed by longtime guitarist, Gerry Leonard, bassist Jeff Allen and keyboardist Jamie Edwards. The album was produced by Gerry Leonard, mixed by Grammy Award winning engineer Kevin Killen and mastered by Grammy Award winner, Bob Ludwig.

Like the artist himself, the music on this brilliant album defies all categories, embracing Terry Callier's wide range of influences and experiences. Callier's musical kaleidoscope is filled with funk, rock, folk, jazz, and even classical influences. "Dancing Girl" opens the album with Charles Stepney's majestic orchestration. This opus is the album's pinnacle, moving with soft intensity toward soul-stirring crescendos. Songs like "What Color Is Love" and "Ho Tsing Mee (A Song of the Sun)," an elegant antiwar prayer of confusion, somehow avoid clichés or take them to another level. "You Goin' to Miss Your Candyman" was made popular by Urban Species when they sampled it on "Listen" in the early '90s, and not surprisingly, it sounds better in its original form. No matter where you turn, Callier's passionate voice captures the sweeping drama of the human condition. A lost romantic amid "concrete front yards," this album is a must-have for any music connoisseur.

Orphans is the most unwieldy Tom Waits collection yet. Packaged in a Cibachrome-tinted box are three discs containing 56 songs total. It claims 30 new tunes, but a mere 14 can be found on other records - six others have to be hunted for while the remainder have shown up in various incarnations. This crazy thing began as a collection of outtakes, rarities, soundtrack tunes, and compilation-only cuts - some of which survive here in new form, including tracks from the Ramblin' Jack Elliot tribute, the Bridge benefit, and two Ramones covers, to name a few. In other words, the first conception was as a hodgepodge collection of attic material. Waits checked out the tune selection as it was and said something like "nah, bad idea; this would suck." So, he did what any self-respecting artist with a head full of ideas, two stomping, shuffling feet, and itchy fingers - and time on his hands - would do: he recorded new songs and re-recorded others…

On his debut album, Randy Newman sounded as if he was still getting used to the notion of performing his own songs in the studio (despite years of cutting songwriting demos), but apparently he was a pretty quick study, and his second long-player, 12 Songs, was a striking step forward for Newman as a recording artist. While much of Randy Newman was heavily orchestrated, 12 Songs was cut with a small combo (Ry Cooder and Clarence White take turns on guitar), leaving a lot more room for Newman's Fats Domino-gone-cynical piano and the bluesier side of his vocal style, and Randy sounds far more confident and comfortable in this context. And Newman's second batch of songs were even stronger than his first (no small accomplishment), rocking more and grooving harder but losing none of their intelligence and careful craft in the process…

Occasional Rain, originally released in 1972, is the first of three albums, Chicago singer/songwriter Terry Callier cut for Cadet in the 1970s with producer Charles Stepney. Eight years earlier Callier, then a soulful blues and folk singer, cut an album of covers (as was par for the course in 1964 at the end of the folk revival, Bob Dylan was just getting his momentum) for Prestige, but it was shelved until 1968 and went nowhere. Callier spent the intervening time touring coffeehouses and small clubs around the country until he signed with Cadet. While the voice is most certainly the same, the nearly alchemical transformation of his sound via his own songwriting - and the way those songs were treated by Stepney - is still mind-boggling…

A man with as much experience as he has ingenuity, Randall Bramblett has been a singer-songwriter, a session musician, and a hired gun for legends such as Gregg Allman and Steve Winwod. Bramblett’s latest release from his more than thirty years in the business, Devil Music, delivers the expected level of virtuosity, and surprises with a deep-fried, novel twist of Southern darkness. “Dead in the Water,” the album’s lead single is equally fulfilled through evocative lyrics, well-timed and managed effects, and instrumental superiority; a narrative of nowhere, the track is populated by dead-end characters and lowly living; fitting, for a track that Bramblett claims is inspired by William S. Burroughs. While immersing itself in the wonderfully weird, infinitely spiraling darkness of whimsy that exemplifies some of Tom Waits’ best work, “Dead in the Water” sees a guest appearance by storied axeman Mark Knopfler.

Five years after the disappointing The Magazine, Rickie Lee Jones returned to form with Flying Cowboys, which shared much of the playful, childlike charm of her debut, Rickie Lee Jones, and some of the musically diffuse, lyrically ambitious form of its follow-up, Pirates. From the opening track, "The Horses," which suggested a mother's delight with her child as much as a lover's devotion, Jones reintroduced the joyous tone of her early work as well as establishing the Western theme that would run through the album - cowboys, rodeos, horses, deserts - without adding up to an actual storyline. The easy rhythms and lazy, flexible singing on the first few songs were reminiscent of Laura Nyro's work with Labelle on their Gonna Take a Miracle album, after which Jones branched out into reggae and folk-blues, coming up with an affectionate bluesman voice on "Ghost Train"…

Bad as Me is Tom Waits' first collection of new material in seven years. He and Kathleen Brennan - wife, co-songwriter, and production partner - have, at the latter's insistence, come up with a tight-knit collection of short tunes, the longest is just over four minutes. This is a quick, insistent, and woolly aural road trip full of compelling stops and starts. While he's kept his sonic experimentation - especially with percussion tracks - Waits has returned to blues, rockabilly, rhythm & blues, and jazz as source material. Instead of sprawl and squall, we get chug and choogle. For "Chicago" - via Clint Maedgen's saxes, Keith Richards' (who appears sporadically here) and Marc Ribot's guitars, son Casey Waits' drums, dad's banjo, percussion and piano, and Charlie Musselwhite's harmonica (he appears numerous times here, too) - we get a 21st century take on vintage R&B…