I’m bound to make my regular readers happy with this theme week, which will actually span two weeks and ten albums. I know my sister considers Lyle Lovett her ‘desert island’ artist (though where we’d get batteries for the CD player on this island, I don’t know — I love that moment in Season One of Lost where Hurley’s discman finally runs out on him).

I won’t go so far as to call Lovett my own desert island artist, but he’s definitely in the running. His combination of rootsy instrumentation, jazz flourishes and literate, humorous lyrics — not to mention that world-class voice — puts him in a league of his own. He doesn’t make it to my island because there’s a sameness in his work over the past 20+ years, but if you have to settle on a sound, he couldn’t have picked a better one.

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