Brandon's Buzz

Slim pickin’s on the new release wall this week, there’s no two ways around it. Let’s be careful out there:

• The legendary Tom Jones returns to his gospel roots
  on his latest record, Praise and Blame.

 

• Recording under the moniker of Owl City, a kid called Adam Young created a sensation at pop radio earlier in the year with his monster left-field smash “Fireflies,” and while we patiently await the next OC record, Young satiates our burning curiosity in the meantime with
  An Airplane Carried Me to Bed, a collection of tunes he composed and recorded four years ago under the name of Sky Sailing.

 

• That woeful fool Clay Aiken supplements his latest covers record
  with a companion DVD entitled Tried and True Live!.

 

• The fabulous Natalie Merchant pops up this week
  with an exclusive session, which features an
  amazing acoustic reading of her 1998 hit “Break Your Heart,”
  as well as a fun rendition of The Wizard of Oz‘s classic standard
  “If I Only Had a Brain.”

 

• Finally, my single favorite pop culture wordsmith ever — Rolling Stone‘s blisteringly brilliant music critic Rob Sheffield — follows up his shattering 2008 memoir Love is a Mix Tape with a hilarious new chronicle of having spent his adolescence selling his soul to FM radio, Talking to Girls About Duran Duran: One Young Man’s Quest
  for True Love and a Cooler Haircut.

names dropped with reckless abandon: Adam Young, Clay Aiken, Duran Duran, Natalie Merchant, Owl City, Rob Sheffield, Sky Sailing, Tom Jones