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Bruce Springsteen

"We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions"

On sale at All That Jazz for $16.98

Bruce Springsteen succeeds once again by making you proud to have been born in the U.S.A. I wasn't expecting folk music, but I immediately started tapping my foot and looked around the room for someone to swing me around by my arm.

The music sounds like it is coming out of some whisky parlor in the Deep South, yet it came from three days of recording --ne day each in '97, '05 and '06 -- in Springsteen's New Jersey farmhouse. There were no rehearsals. If you listen closely, you can hear Bruce shouting out the names and the instruments of the players as they get lost in their own contagious rhythm.

You can feel the freedom of the Pete Seeger-composed music -- the energy, the big smiles and the concentrated brows as finger plucking took hold of these New York musicians who had never played together until they recorded this live album.

Bruce describes the liberating sounds of the participating accordion, fiddle, banjo, upright bass, and washboard as "street corner music, parlor music, tavern music, wilderness music, circus music, church music, gutter music -- it was all there waiting in those songs, some more than 100 years old."

I don't want to highlight any song on this CD because they are all equally good. This is the first truly well-crafted album off which I wouldn't want to buy only one or two songs from iTunes. I want all of them.

Rating: Buy a train ticket across the country, a good pair of sunglasses and this album.

Tool

"10,000 Days"

On sale at All That Jazz for $15.98

"10,000 Days" is the much-anticipated album that is exactly what Tool fans were waiting for (they've been waiting five years.) Maynard James Keenan has that unmistakable voice that can make the listener want to lift one arm into the air to ignite the lighter before the encore.

This album is an experience on the impalpable, exquisite level. But the songs are really long --e're talking in the seven- to 11-minute range.

The packaging includes these crazy stereoscopic glasses that turn the art in the booklet into 3D pictures. They are as surreal as this album feels.

The song "Rosetta Stoned" has a Pink Floyd-meets-Marilyn Manson feel to it, and "Lipan Conjuring" starts off like the music in that scary scene in "Natural Born Killers" when Mickey and Mallory get bit by a rattlesnake.

According to Nielsen SoundScan, "10,000 Days" is the No. 1 album in Canada, and it's No. 1 in the U.S. on the Billboard Top 200 Chart.

Rating: Someone call Hollywood -- we got the soundtrack for "The Matrix, Part 4."

Ani DiFranco

"Carnegie Hall -- 4.6.02"

On sale at All That Jazz for $13.98

I'd be amazed if you could hear Ani DiFranco's voice over your own excited vocals as you sing along with the woman who brings more passion to her music than a grocery store romance novel. Our girl is back, singing an intimate live show at Carnegie Hall and laughing and telling all of the charming little stories for which we fell in love with her.

If you're a DiFranco fan, you're a hardcore DiFranco fan, because there is no other kind. And you will appreciate this honest and loyal representation of the enormous presence of this 5-foot, self-proclaimed "little folk singer."

Her songs are like good friends because you've heard all of them before. Except, of course, for a poem she reads by Judy Grahn that begins, "Her words pour out as if her throat were cut glass carelessly handled."

Also on the album, DiFranco explains the meaning behind "Gratitude," so you'll finally know who that man is that she had to share a bed with.

The Carnegie Hall show was the first time DiFranco read her poem "Self Evident," which is about Sept. 11. She said reading the lines, "On the day that America/fell to its knees/after strutting around for a century/without saying thank you/or please," was one of the most intense on-stage experiences of her life.

This album features "Serpentine," DiFranco's other amazing poem/song. It boasts lyrics such as, "We start out sugared up on Kool-Aid and manifest destiny/and then we're spit in to the world/ so many spinny-eyed TV junkies/ incapable of unraveling the military industrial history/ preemptively pacified with history book history."

"Carnegie Hall" is from DiFranco's 2002 solo tour and is a must have for any Ani collection.

Rating: Seriously, did you ever think that you wouldn't buy it?

-- Allison Plean