For your new year's eve listening pleasure, a 30 track collection of music generally released during 2012 in one form or another. I've included links to where you can find or listen to the music. Drive carefully.

1. “Neptune City (for the shore)” by Nicole Atkins: New Jersey native Atkins recorded this piano/vocal version of the title song from her 2007 album at Sun Studios in Memphis, as a fundraiser for Hurricane Sandy relief. But it’s clear from…

As time goes on (and what I mean to say is, as I get older), reissues preoccupy more of my time, money and shelf space. Whether that means I am lost in nostalgia for a presumed better day in music, or whether it reflects the fact that at a discrete chronological point, you no longer are the desired target market for contemporary music, I can't say. But I do know that as most of the record business turns away from the marginal profitability of archival recordings, some clever labels appear to…

In a generally descending order of excellence ...but they are all pretty excellent.

Kathleen Edwards - Voyageur: It is shocking to realize that almost a decade has passed since I first wrote about Edwards for No Depression, just prior to the U.S. release of her debut album Failer. While her subsequent albums delivered on her initial promise,…

The exquisite New Jersey-bred singer-songwriter Nicole Atkins is donating all proceeds from a new version of her song "Neptune City" to storm relief and rebuilding. This piano version of Atkins' ode to her home turf was recorded at Sun Studios in Memphis, but the heart of both the song and the singer are firmly planted in the Jersey shore.

It is a great version of a great song for an even greater cause. You can get the track here for a bargain $2.…

Twenty five years ago last March, I was seated in the waiting room of the A&R department at CBS Records in Manhattan. It was my first trip to New York and one of my first formal forays in writing about music. I was panicked as I waited to interview a label exec for my Honors journalism thesis. How should I act? What should I say or do? Just the usual anxiety one feels (or at least I felt) when I was at that stage when I had picked an intended career but still had no idea what I…