I’ll have the promised Cory Maye updates once I get my computer back (this weekend, I’m hoping). In the meantime, here’s this week’s five-star Friday pick. Appropriate, I think.

“None of Us Are Free,” by Solomon Burke, with the Blind Boys of Alabama.

I’ve already picked this one once before, but it’s my choice for single of the year. And there’s now some YouTubage of it. So let’s do it again.

“Fans,” by Kings of Leon.

Also, here’s a pretty badass live version of the same song:

“Going Through the Motions,” by the sadly no more Bloomington, Indiana band, Mysteries of Life.

Listen here.

“Once Upon a Time,” by Robert Bradley’s Blackwater Surprise.

“Stick ‘Em Up,” by Quarashi.

An excellent addition to your run/work out mix. Also, a hard-edge rock/rap group from…Iceland?

So as it turns out, one of my best chums from college is in a band called The 1900s. I already knew that, of course. What I didn’t know until last week is that the band is making some noise, and seems to have garnered a healthy hipster following (not to mention a flattering review from All Music Guide). Their sound is retro, and like nothing else out there right now. At least that I’ve heard. Little bit Velvet Underground (isn’t everyone?), plus some Bread, some Fleetwood Mac, some New Pornographers, some THEM, and, mostly, lots and lots of 70s AM Gold. Listen closely, and you might even pick up some Leo Sayer in there (okay, just kidding).

The 70s vibe is present in their live show, too (they just played D.C. Rock ‘n’ Roll Hotel). Lead singer Edward Anderson donned cords with a fat brown belt, a starchy western shirt, and a pageboy-meets-hippie haricut–looking like a cross between Danny Partridge and a young Van Morrison. Co-singers Caroline Donovan and Jeanine O’Toole belt out some nice harmonies on a few tunes, and lead on others, but always sing with a cool, Nico-like detachment. My friend Charlie Ransford plays bass.

Listen to all of their new album here. My five-star selection for this week is “Georgia,” track two.

“Ooh La La,” by the Faces.

Listen here.

“The Door,” by Turin Brakes

“Deeper Shade of Soul,” by Urban Dance Squad.

“Girl in the War,” by Josh Ritter.

My girlfriend comes home tomorrow after six months in Argentina. So in celebration, this week’s song I guess you could say is one of “our” songs. I like it because it’s irreverent, self-deprecating, bawdy, funny, and yet still manages to pull of a sweet sentiment. Also, I’m a huge fan of John Prine. So this week’s song is “In Spite of Ourselves,” a duet by John Prine and Iris DeMent.

I’ve decided I need to limit myself to one song per week or I’m going to run out of songs.

This week’s song: “Looking for a Love,” by Ryan Shaw.

Shaw’s a young guy who sings songs that could’ve been (and in some cases, were) written in the 1960s. He’s throwback soul, complete with sing-songy, sometimes throwaway lyrics (though Shaw does do a mean “A Change Is Gonna’ Come”), and lots of homage to guys like Cooke, Redding, Picket, and Wilson.

The guy’s voice is smooth as chess pie, and he’s said many times he wants to reclaim the good named of R&B from the beating it took in the 1990s. Damn skippy.

This week’s song is my favorite tune off his debut album. It’s just a roll-down-the-windows, big smile, sing-along kinda’ thing. I can’t find it anywhere online, so just cough up the 99 cents to iTunes.

It’s raining here, so for this week, here are four tunes to brood by:

“Old Shoes (& Picture Postcards),” by Tom Waits.

Actually, you could just put in Closing Time or Heart of Saturday Night for a full CD’s worth of brooding. This or “Martha” is probably my favorite Tom Waits song.

“The Ship Song,” by Nick Cave

A darkly beautiful love song, filled with Cave’s trademark surreal images and contemplative metaphors. I actually like the live version below quite a lot. But the best version of this song is the one Cave did with Concrete Blonde, which you can find on the latter’s greatest hits album (that CD, by the way, is worth the price if only for that song and a killer acoustic version of “Joey”). Cave’s stark, devilish baritone and Johnette Napolitano’s choir-girl vocals provide for a nice contrast. Seductive, romantic, and a little bit gothic.

“Little Silver Ring,” by the Samples

First got into the Samples in college. This is one of my favorites.

“Down,” by Suede

I’m pretty sure this song is about drug addiction. But it’s pretty dramatic, and moving. The electronica vibe is good if you’re in one of those get-lost-in-your-thoughts moods. I’m not sure the song really fits the images in this YouTube spot, but I’m just posting it for the song.

I have lots more. I’m sure we’ll return to this category of Five Star Fridays at a later date. And please, by all means, send your own suggestions.

I’m feeling a little overwhelmed after my trip to Louisiana. I don’t want to scoop my own story, so I’m afraid I can’t provide a lot of detail right now. But it’s a pretty amazing and hard-to-fathom story involving race, injustice, and the drug war (aren’t they all?).

So this week’s five-star tunes are liberty-themed:

My favorite songs with “Jesus” in the title:

This week’s edition is inspired by the envy I feel for anyone going on this cruise.

How flippin’ cool that would be. John Hiatt and Emmylou Harris alone would be worth the price.

Anyway, it made me think of Hiatt, also known as “the pride of Broad Ripple, Indiana,” and in the opinion of your humble Agitator, one of the most underrated musicians in rock.

Hiatt has a number of five-star songs on the Agitator iPod. He also put out what I believe is one of the best albums of the 1990s, 1995’s Walk On, which the normally reliable All Music Guide shamefully gives only three stars.

I’ll list just three songs tonight, and save the others for a five-star Friday the next time I see Hiatt in concert.

“Cry Love,” from Walk On

Begins with a funky little mandolin riff that stays with the entire song. Big, sing-aloud chorus. Hiatt’s gruff rasp. Just an all-around, feel-good window rattler.

“Walk On,” from Walk On

Moody, broody ballad about moving on from bad times. Hiatt wails like a bloodhound in this one. In tune, of course. Evocative lyrics, including the great line, “Steam rising from the sidewalks of New Orleans after an evening rain.” Sorry, can’t find video for this one.

“Buffalo River Home,” from Perfectly Good Guitar

Everything a John Hiatt song should be. Great blend of roots, country, and rock; a needling guitar riff; earthy lyrics accented with wit and folksy wisdom (”just when you think that you’ve been gyped/the bearded lady comes and does a double back flip”); and another of the soaring choruses the guy does so well.

Also, I’ve only seen Hiatt in concert once. But it was amazing. He plays at a venue less than a mile from where I love a few times each year. Unfortunately, tickets are usually $85 or more, and all three shows usually sell out in minutes. But if you get the chance, you should catch him. The guy’s an amazing musician.

I figure in advance of my trip to South America, I should recommend a couple songs with some Latin flavor. Problem is, I’m not all that fond of Latin music. I do like Latin accents, though. A little timbale, or maraca here and there. So my two cop-out picks:

“Carmelita,” by Warren Zevon. What’s great about this song is how effectively Zevon paints a scene (a desperate heroin addict crying out to his paramour in Southern California) with relatively few lyrics, in a rather short song. For such a sad ballad, it also has this remarkable ability to tempt to you to sing along. It’s my favorite Zevon song.

“La Cienega Just Smiled,” by Ryan Adams. A nice, chill cut off of Gold. Still have no idea what La Cienega means. Is it a proper name?

MORE: Several readers email to say “La Cienega” literally means “the swamp” or “the marsh,” but it’s also the proper name of several streets, geographical areas, and such. So I guess we can infer from the lyrics that Adams is referring to the girl by the street she lives on. That, or there’s a poor Latino woman somewhere out there whose parents named her “The Swamp.”

Coleman’s a controversial figure in jazz (Miles Davis famously criticized him), but arguably also the best saxophonist alive. He won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for music earlier this month for his album Sound Grammar. That album probably isn’t the best introduction to Coleman (for that, go back nearly fifty years, for his 1959 album The Shape of Jazz to Come).

Avant-garde jazz is an acquired taste, even for jazz aficionados (which I’m not — I love jazz, but I’m a novice listener). Instead, this week I’m recommending two fantastic pop songs that feature Coleman’s virtuosity. They’re from the same album, Scar, by one of my personal favorites, Joe Henry.

The first is called “Richard Pryor Addresses a Tearful Nation,” and despite the presumptive title, is a masterpiece. I’ll just hand off to All Music Guide’s Thom Jurek, who’s often wordy, but seldom wrong:

The opener, “Richard Pryor Addresses a Tearful Nation,” slips its smoky way into being with a whining guitar by Marc Ribot, a vibraphone by Brian Blade, and Henry’s cigarette-stained vocal: “Sometimes I think I’ve almost fooled myself/Spreading out my wings above us like a tree/Laughing now out loud/Almost like I was free/I look at you as the thing I wanted most/You look at me and it’s like you see a ghost/I wear the face all of this has cost/Everything you tried to keep away from me/Everything I took from you and lost.” It’s a blues tune, where steel guitar is trumped by Ornette Coleman’s alto blowing his deepest soul-blues. He thins the lyric yet digs its knife in deeper. By the tune’s nadir, the protagonist has shrunk to the vanishing point and disappears in a wisp of smoke.

The Coleman solo really steals what’s an already incredible song.

My second recommendation is the title track, “Scar.” The first four minutes or so are Henry at his best — smoldering vocals evocative of early-era Tom Waits; intimate, searching, deeply personal lyrics sung in the first-person voice of a broken-down man; and an appropriately slow, wafting score, driven by an acoustic guitar, with accents of electric guitar, snare, and soft organ that sounds like a synthesizer set on “calliope.” It’s a fully-realized bit of songcraft. But beautiful as it is, the treat comes once main song is over. The music fades into an almost cinematic coda, hinting at what’s to come. There’s then a prolonged silence, followed by what I can only describe as a sort of hushed, post-apocalyptic soundscape. There’s a vague audible haze, accompanied by odd squeaks and squawks, pops and distortions–you’ve entered a weird, dystopic, sonic realm, backdrop for an amazing, unaccompanied, completely unexpected Coleman solo. It begins abruptly, then softens a bit. It weaves in and out of the backdrop, wriggles and stretches and teases, then deflates, and fades into the landscape. You almost imagine him blowing from atop some mound of cataclysmic rubble. The solo isn’t listed on the album jacket. I remember first discovering it, just by the happenstance of having been too lazy to flip CDs when I thought the track had ended. I was floored. Still am every time I listen to it.

So today’s five-star recommendations are:

“Richard Pryor Addresses a Tearful Nation,” and “Scar,” both by Joe Henry, and both featuring Ornette Coleman.

Unfortunately, neither is available on iTunes (though Henry’s excellent and most recent CD “Tiny Voices” is). So I guess you’ll have to buy the entire Scar album if you want to own them. You won’t be disappointed.

This week’s five-star song is “Captain Badass,” by Songs: Ohia.

The band is really just one guy, Jason Molina, who started in heavy metal, then moved to indie rock, and has worked all sorts of other styles into his music since. He’s not all that well known, though he did release a half-and-half LP with My Morning Jacket back in 2002, before the latter made it big.

“Captain Badass” is a bare bones, acoustic tune that’s about a guy prepared to carry on with an affair with a woman he knows will eventually burn him–and not particularly caring. The song’s driven by Molina’s convincing, just a little off-key vocals, and the short, staccato strums of his guitar. It’s good music to brood to–rainy day music.

Now, we introduce a new feature here at TheAgitator.com. I’ve been getting email requests for more music blogging. Problem is, album reviews are too time consuming for me to do too regularly. I also don’t buy nearly as much music as I used to.

So I decided I’ll recommend a song or two each Friday that has merited the vaunted 5-star rating in your humble Agitator’s iTunes. This is not a rating I take lightly. There’s actually a little ritual I perform before assigning a five-star rating (I had to stop when neighbors complained about the bird carcases in the backyard). And rarely does a new release merit the distinction.

But since last Tuesday, I’ve been rockin’ on repeat to a wonderful cut off the new Kings of Leon album, Because of the Times. The album itself is a bit uneven (the second half is much better than the first), though that’s not much of a criticism. Like Tiger, KoL’s B-game still blows away most of the field (okay, probably not the best analogy after last weekend). Me, I’m a little torn. I’m afraid I may soon need to transfer the “most rock ‘n’ roll rock ‘n’ roll band in America” banner from my all-time favorite band to these guys. Really. They’re that damned good.

Like the Crowes, Kings of Leon are unmistakably southern. But they’re not debutante balls and sweet tea southern. More like lawn chairs, cousin-on-cousin-incest, and pit sweat southern. But, you know, in a good way. I’ve heard them described as “Lynyrd Skynyrd meets the Strokes,” which is probably pretty accurate as far those “Band A meets Band B” kinds of descriptions go.

If you want a proper album introduction, stick with their debut Youth and Young Manhood, or Aha Shake Heartbreak, both of which also have a few five-star cuts. This one’s less accessible in the first few listens. And I’m not sure the feral, cat-under-the-lawnmower screams in track two will ever quite grow on me.

But Because of the Times does have a few cuts that immediately grab you by the ears (then thrust your head in a bucket of hooch). Most notably, track nine. If you’re looking for a window-rattler for the warm spring weather, go download the song “Fans.” Muscular guitar; a big, fat, bass-fishin’ hook; a way late, half-drunk backbeatbeat; and Caleb Followill’s badass dirty weasel screech. I dare you to drive the speed limit. This song is dirty as the barroom floor.

And the best part? I haven’t the slightest inkling what it’s about.

So today’s five-star song: “Fans,” by Kings of Leon.