Hilary McRae has a voice that surprises, coming from a 21-year-old. It's not that she sounds old and wise for her age. What stands out is her composure, the Motown-to-Brill Building tilt of her songwriting, and the mixed male-female timbre of her singing. It's not a voice you expect to hear from a 21-year-old, let alone one from not-so-gritty Boca Raton.

The temptation is to think of her as an American Amy Winehouse (minus the drama), someone offering a contemporary take on great 20th century pop. A more apt comparison would be another American, John Legend, a singer and pianist with a suave but heartfelt style.

McRae is also the first new artist signed to Hear Music, the record label owned by Starbucks, which makes her a test case for the coffee retailer's music business.

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Chicago's Bloodshot Records will release an anthology of music by South Florida roots-rock-punk virtuoso Charlie Pickett. "It's finally going to happen," Bloodshot spokesperson Heather West told me today. West said late summer or early fall was the likeliest time frame for the release.

To be called Bar Band Americanus, it will contain 19 tracks from a trio of Pickett LPs - Route 33, Cowboy Junkie A Go Go and The Wilderness - plus some 45s, unreleased cuts and live recordings.

Pickett practices law nowadays, but he still plays out. There's an excellent entry on Pickett at allmusic.com, which says in part:

To this guitar-playing native of Dania, FL, punk rock meant old Rolling Stones and mid-'60s garage rock more than the Ramones and Sex Pistols, and that devotion to a hyped-up roots rock sound was what made Charlie Pickett such a fine performer.

I'll pass along new information as I hear it.

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It's with great relief I can report that Field Manual, the forthcoming solo album by Death Cab for Cutie's Chris Walla, has survived its run-in with Homeland Security.

Last fall a courier toting a hard drive with the master tracks was stopped at the U.S.-Canada border, and had to surrender the goods. We don't know what, if any, interrogation procedures Field Manual underwent, but hopefully it's emerged stronger for the experience. The new CD is due next Tuesday, Jan. 29, and the folks at Walla's label, Barsuk, were kind enough to provide a new track. Enjoy (in RealAudio):

Chris Walla: Sing Again

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I love this record label site. It's the home of the Sao Paolo-based Trama, which specializes in all kinds of Brazilian music (Elis Regina, Tom Ze, Gal Costa, Max de Castro, Rappin' Hood). The front page has a light, airy look that improves my mood every time I see it, and in the upper right hand are some freebies before you buy.

I'm just wondering what happened to SambaLoco Drum & Bass, a new-meets-old Brazilian club music compilation that looks like a blast. It's listed on an earlier verison of Trama's homepage, which is still posted here. But the CD info link appears to have expired, and I can't find SambaLoco in the catalog listing at the current version of the site.

On the other hand, the old Trama page has a handful of free songs still available for download, so I'm not totally gripped by saudade.

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Radiohead, which doesn't have a record label anymore, and may never need one again, will let fans pay what they want to download the band's new album, In Rainbows, starting Oct. 10.

The BBC reported on Tuesday that traffic at Radiohead's Web site has been heavy, complicating some visitors' efforts to preorder. I logged on today without difficulty, and to help me pick a fair price, there was a link to a currency converter.

The alternative - likewise available only through the Web site - is an In Rainbows disc box containing extras, all at a fixed price of 40 pounds UK, or about $81.50 US. The box ships in December, according to the band's Web site.

The BBC says Radiohead is talking to labels about releasing an old-fashioned CD version of In Rainbows early next year. What's interesting is that Radiohead, as a free agent, can do what it likes, and doesn't have to do anything it doesn't like. In letting each buyer set his or her own price, the band is sharing its freedom of choice.

So are the out-there rockers of Radiohead also revolutionary capitalists?

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Dashboard Confessional (aka Chris Carrabba) and John Ralston both call South Florida home, so it shouldn't be hard to find their new albums in local stores. Dashboard's The Shade of Poison Trees and Ralston's Sorry Vampire are both out today on Vagrant Records, the California indie label that's also home to Eels, the Futureheads, The Hold Steady, Paul Westerberg and Saves the Day.

I talked to both performers recently - Ralston two Saturdays ago at City Limits in Delray Beach, and Carrabba by telephone last Tuesday. The story in today's paper (posted here) focuses on a hometown gig, and the mix of anticipation and anxiety that goes with playing in one's own backyard.

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Quoth the AP (on Time's Web site):

50 Cent may be getting hip-hop's equivalent of a gold watch next week. Early reports have Kanye West beating 50 in their much-hyped battle of album sales.

You'll recall that 50 Cent said he would stop making solo albums if West's Graduation outsold 50's Curtis.

Sez AP:

As of day one, Kanye had sold 437,000 copies to 50's 310,000, according to Nielsen Soundscan. Both albums came out Tuesday, and a confident 50 Cent famously announced that he would retire if West outsold him in first-week sales. "I just don't view him as competition based on our previous sales histories," 50 Cent told The Associated Press last month.

Actually, it was first-day sales, not first week, and 50 Cent made the initial challenge in an interview with the hip-hop news Website SOHH.COM, posted August 10.

Here's what 50 said.

"Put it like this," 50 told SOHH. "Let's raise the stakes. If Kanye West sells more records than 50 Cent on September 11, I'll no longer write music. I'll write music and work with my other artists, but I won't put out any more solo albums."

So, the rap battle that another SOHH staffer called "gangsta vs. schoolboy" is already over.

Gangsta's honor, Curtis!

Now if you really believe he's going to bow out, I have a bridge connecting Queens and Manhattan that may interest you.

As the New York Daily News put it in a piece based on a more recent interview with 50, " ... this whole 'retirement' shtick means essentially nothing."

"I was just raising the stakes," says 50. "When they hear, 'He's going to retire,' it draws attention."

In the end, there's little but upside to this "controversy." By next week, both albums collectively will have sold more than a million copies. The ailing music industry will get a nice one-week bump in CD sales before returning to its regularly scheduled gnashing of teeth. And as 50 himself noted in the Daily News, this has been the sort of rap competition in which nobody got hurt.

Not a bad note to retire on.

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I can't remember a CD review causing more reader blowback than last week's writeup of The Real Testament, the major-label debut of a Fort Myers rapper named Plies (pronounced "Plize", tall 'i', silent 'e').

We picked up the review from The New York Times and ran it on the cover of last Tuesday's Lifestyle section. Critical e-mails, phone calls, letters to the editor and online comments poured in.

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From my colleague, Sun-Sentinel Books Editor Chauncey Mabe, comes this review of the first solo CD by fiddler and singer Elana James. James' self-titled debut was released Feb. 27 on Snarf Records, and Mabe has tagged this as the arrival of a major talent.

Fiddler Elana James, a former member of Bob Dylan’s touring band, emerges on her debut solo disc a fully formed musical entity, combining -- with unlikely authenticity -- what seems like the entire history of jazz, string-band and country music. Anyone disenchanted with the sleepy charms of Norah Jones, who has been subject to a recent and not-altogether-justified backlash, might find this album a joyful pick-me-up.

James, who cut her teeth with the neo-Western swing trio Hot Club of Cowtown, treats all her influences as living art forms, not museum pieces, and she’s confident enough as a songwriter to open with her own Bob Wills-ish fiddle swing, Twenty-Four Hours a Day, only to follow with a convincing cover of Dylan’s One More Night, which she presents with the dignified simplicity of a Carter Family tune.

Oh, Baby, another sprightly James original that sounds like it must have been written in the 1930s, gives way to a barn-dance rendition of the traditional Goodbye Liza Jane, followed by the mournful hillbilly lament All the World and I, another James-penned tune. Indeed, while the covers range from Dylan to country pioneer Carson Robison to Duke Ellington and Eubie Blake, James writes more than half the songs, with no fall-off in quality.

Her song Down the Line melds country-fiddling brio to jazz sensibility with breathtaking ease. James deftly interprets the Ellington classics I’ve Got It Bad (And That Ain’t Good) and I Don’t Mind, singing with a supple sophistication that makes these well-worn chestnuts sound fresh as mountain laurel in bloom.
Yet she immediately swings into the ancient dance hall joys of Silver Bells, and turns Robison’s The Little Green Valley into an improbable yet wholly convincing jazz two-step.

As the co-producer on the album, James shows herself not only a fine musician and songwriter, but also a bandleader par excellence, and master of her own musical fate, too. She uses her modest vocal talents expertly, sultry or coquettish or mournful as the occasion requires, singing with playful warmth and tastefulness and setting exactly the right mood for each song.

That Elana James can create such artfully artless fun in the nexus where country and jazz collide is a near miracle. Louder, more bombastic and self-conscious jazz or country records will doubtless be produced this year, but don’t expect any of them to be as persistently listenable as this small gem.

-- Chauncey Mabe

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A line in a Billboard review of the first Supernova single jumped out at me. Discussing the band's creation on the CBS series Rock Star, and the single's prospects as a result, the reviewer wrote, "These days, radio seldom has the courage to break new acts without other media staging the groundwork."

We can argue whether "courage" and "radio" ever, under any circumstances, belong in the same sentence (sort of like "bravery" and "pop criticism"). But the point that other media now do the buzz-building that used to be radio's job is interesting -- and plausible. I'd love to see some research to back it up. Do more songs than ever make their way to the Billboard Hot 100 chart from television, advertising and the Internet? Has radio mostly abdicated its role as the medium of breakthrough?

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