Today's title is how the Playlist reads on my iPod. The asterisk keeps the Playlist of this week's two albums coming up first. A helpful hint to help keep all you fellow practitioners of the Program on track. This week Matt Cleveland and I each picked an album. Matt pickedThe Shins'new "Wincing the Night Away." To counter his thoughtful indie pop, I've picked some thoughtful, until recently, underground (hip-hop-eeze for indie) rap: Common's 2000 album "Like Water for Chocolate" As for last week's selections: I did come around to ol' man Petty by the fourth or fifth spin. His lyrics really are good. His stories really are well spun. His music... still annoyed me but it blended into the background when I focused on the tales he was telling. I grew especially fond of the title track,M. Ward's arcane, old-world production values are still what makes his album shine. He has fewer actual songs with lyrics on this album but I think that shows restraint. The man can edit himself. I can't help but wonder if some of the acoustic instrumentals might have blossomed into fully lyricized songs given more time. But what amazes me most is that Ward found this voice of old sounding music this many albums back into his catalog. What we're hearing now in "Post-War" and "Transistor Radio," he's been doing for years now. As something of a music gear-head there's a part of me that really wants to pry into his studio and see how he's getting all these sounds. It's funny, Petty and Co. probably spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on the gear and the production and mixing of "Into the Great Wide Open" while I suspect Ward got his signature sound by using the oldest, cheapest mic's, old tape, old strings and a voice, though not nearly as old as Petty's, that still fits right in between each static crackle.