Performer: Paul McCartney
The CD: “Memory Almost Full”

It’s no secret: Sir Paul has had a rotten year. A bitter divorce and a custody battle with his much-younger second wife, with his vast fortune at stake and the British tabloids eating up every minute of it with a spoon — that has to make your life seem fairly miserable at times. Luckily for us, when artists go through rough times, sometimes the result is a truly remarkable creation.

“Memory Almost Full” is McCartney’s best work since 1980’s “McCartney II” (which was recorded at another tumultuous time in McCartney’s life, following his fabled Japanese drug bust and eight-day stint in a Tokyo jail). This is the former Beatle’s first album in years that doesn’t suffer from the sheen of contentment that makes much of his post-Beatle music a little hard to take. When I reviewed McCartney’s last CD, “Chaos and Creation In The Backyard,” I noted how hard it was for him to produce music that stood up to his incredible catalog. With this CD, he has delivered an album that stands among his best. (more…)

Miranda Lambert would be easy to dismiss. She placed not first, but third on “Nashville Star,” the off-brand Country version of American Idol. There are plenty of contest winners strutting across the national stage, singing songs picked to cash in on a very specific music taste.

Lambert’s “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” is different than almost all of the other used-to-be contestants’ offerings. First of all, the tiny Texan with the sweet-tea voice and prickly briar rose delivery wrote most of the songs on the album. Not everybody needs to write their own material. Everybody’s favorite, Carrie Underwood, did very well with her song about tearing up a cheating boyfriend’s vehicle in the parking lot of a bar. It was a fair trick given that the achingly wholesome Underwood doesn’t seem the type to date men who would even visit a bar — except maybe to ask for directions. (more…)