A few years ago, a friend sent me a tape she had recorded off the radio in Wisconsin that included a song called "Faultline," a song of disasters from the Titanic to the nuke meltdown, all considered impossible. After I tracked it down, James McCandless' first, LP became one of my year's favorites

My favorites Probably "Black Silk Hat," a simple little ditty about a friend's new chapeau, and how it changed his life, what with winning elections, swimming to London and wowing the ladies, claiming Red China and eventually driving "up to Heaven in Cadillac." The other is the title cut, an ode to working class suburbia and its yards "big enough for three tents filIed with kids, ...big enough for the grownups to drink beer and play cards, for some hearts to get bruised, for some to fall in Iove." There is also 'a swell ragtime tune 'about St Francis; who "smoked little panatellas when he took his coffee break from the birds," called "This Must Be Paradise."