5. THE ORIGIN - "The Origin"(Virgin, 1990)
I love this album almost as much for the way I discovered it as for its content. It was the end of the decade, and a good friend of mine from San Diego was in town for a visit. We were in a long-since-gone record shop, and I saw this title in a basket of cassettes that were priced at 50 cents each. So, for curiosity more than anything else, I bought it. The next day we took it along on a day-long drive through the countryside, popped it into the tape deck ... and it was like the album was made just for that occasion. My friend and I loved each and every one of these breezy, folk-tinged rock-pop tunes as they played, and we just let the tape replay over and over again for the whole drive, never getting tired of it. Shortly after he went home a few days later, he succeeded in finding two copies of it on CD -- one for him and one for me. It's been in our list of favorites ever since.
4. OWSLEY - "Owsley"(Giant, 1999)
Power-pop doesn't get much better than this. Will Owsley, a regular member of Amy Grant's touring band, and busy session musician with a variety of artists (he can be heard most recently on the Jonas Brothers' latest album), struck out on his own in a big way with this self-titled batch of lively tunes, brimming with hummable melodies, packed with clever lyrics, and dressed with plenty of crunchy guitars. The music lover can identify with "Oh No The Radio", sincere sentimentality abounds on "Good Old Days", a mysterious and spooky time is had on "Zavelow House", and quirky paranoia is the order of the day on "The Sky Is Falling". Those are the fantastic songs; the rest of them are only excellent. This is yet another example of a superb album that everyone should know, instead going unnoticed and failing to catapult the artist into stardom the way they should have been.
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