Scotland is a land that has already brought us Belle and Sebastian, Arab Strap, Teenage Fanclub, Franz Ferdinand, The Goldenhour, John Martyn, Idlewild, Daniel Wylie, and a whole host of other artists that literally ooze song writing talent. It is high praise indeed to say that Ally Kerr has emerged as one of its brightest and fastest rising talents.

Perversely it was in far away Japan that he really started to get the recognition he deserves when his debut album Calling Out To You was voted in a magazine’s list of the "Top 20 Albums Ever to Come Out Of Scotland". As a result he was immediately placed alongside some of the aforementioned highly esteemed company. When his track "The Sore Feet Song" was featured on Japanese television animated show Mushishi, it led to it being released as a successful single.

The tide was turning and soon he would achieve the recognition he clearly deserved in his native Scotland. It happened in 2005 when Neon Tetra Records brought him back onto the radar of his homeland and released Calling Out To You. When the single “Could Have Been A Contender” was released early in 2008 it received glowing reviews. Suddenly Ally Kerr was a name to look out for and his new album was eagerly anticipated.

Trawling through the reviews you will see comparisons to all sorts of names such as Simon and Garfunkel, Belle and Sebastian, and Elliot Smith. I can see all of that but there is also something vaguely of Neil Finn and Crowded House about his songs. An upbeat Elliot Smith would most definitely fit as well.

These are somewhat simple, yet effective songs that are expertly crafted. This is the sign of a natural songwriter with something to say and an unfailing ability to make that all important connection to the life, loves, and troubles of the listener. It is jangly, melodic, catchy, memorable pop, with an endearing edge of quirkiness about it that reels you in and wins you over. This is a thinking person’s pop with well crafted melodies, thoughtful lyrics, and more hooks than a Peter Pan convention.

The Jonas Brothers are three guys who shouldn't have any trouble finding themselves a Valentine. While, Kevin Jonas and Joe Jonas still appear to be going strong with their respective ladies, it appears that young Nick is once again single.

Kevin is currently linked to hometown girl Danielle Deleasa (they both grew up in Wyckoff, New Jersey), and Joe is dating "Push" star Camilla Belle. Both had "no comment" about their dating lives when asked by a fan on "The Insider" on Thursday night if they were dating anyone. Meanwhile, 16-year-old Nick, who had been most recently rumored to be dating "Wizards of Waverly Place" star Selena Gomez, replied that these days he's single. (It's a good thing his mom is his Valentine this year.)

When the guys made their first appearance on "The Late Show with David Letterman," also on Thursday night, Letterman got the boys to open up about their former flames.

"We went on tour with Miley [Cyrus]," Nick said about his relationship with the Disney star. He jokingly added, "Again, going back to the ups and downs, I think that I was 14, so it's, you know, I was pretty young, so I think you can just consider it a young little relationship."

Though Kevin stayed mum during the interrogation, Joe goofed around about his much-discussed relationship with Taylor Swift. When Letterman mentioned her name, Joe looked around the room, before teasingly saying, "No, um, yeah, you know, we didn't work out."

Letterman, on a roll after his rather interesting Wednesday-night exchange with Joaquin Phoenix, quickly quipped that Joe's youth makes it easy for him to be so nonchalant about the breakup. "Yeah, it's funny now, but try saying that when you're 62."

The project was Executive Produced by John Carter Cash (Johnny and June's son), Snoop Dogg, and Mathew Knowles (Beyoncé's father), so there is some real music pedigree and blood connection to the original music in this work, which was conceived as a way of bringing some of Cash's seminal music to a wider audience. As my husband is a Southerner born and bred and LOVES Johnny Cash I let him listen first. His response was that I "had to listen to it" because it "managed to be respectful to Cash's music while still interesting in a contemporary way."

So I listened, and then listened again and again. And while I found some of the new mixes tiresome (Snoop Dogg's conversational remix of "I Walk the Line" is a bit too forced and overdone while Kennedy's "Sugartime" sounds like a bad repetitive commercial jingle), I generally enjoyed the plays on classic country blues. Philip Steir's "Get Rhythm" makes me want to dance my blues away just like the shoeshine guy whose story is the song, and Count de Money's remix of "Big River" is riveting.

Then I decided to see what others have had to say and was truly shocked to see the negative reviewer and listener response to this controversial recording. Rolling Stone's Mark Kemp calls it "musical comedy" while Pitchfork Media's Stephen Duesner liken it to "a small, remote geyser through which a little bit of hell bubbles up into our world." Even our very own Lisa Solod Warren said back in August, "The album is frankly a disappointment."

Well, either we have absolutely no taste in music whatsoever or this album really is that controversial, and I would prefer to believe the latter. If Johnny Cash Remixed is causing this much of a stir then it is worth a listen, and the majority of reviews notwithstanding I think you may be pleasantly surprised.

It's not that there wasn't any good music released this year; after all, I was able to come up with a full list of 20 (unlike with 2006, where I wimped out at ten). But there was a lack of greatness this year, with albums that rank very highly this year that would have ranked much lower the year previous. In fact, until I seriously started to think about how this list would shape up, many of the albums on it had failed to grab me throughout the year. In part, this has more to do with the fact that I spent the year listening to older music, but still, if I loved these albums like I loved the ones that topped last year's list, I would've taken notice much earlier.

The result is a list where I'm more comfortable with the bottom half (20-11) than I am with the top half. Not because the albums at the bottom are better (if they were, they'd be higher on the list), but because those albums feel like 20-11-type albums, whereas the albums that place highly on this album don't really feel like high placing albums, but this year they are.

Honourable Mentions: Jenny Lewis - Acid Tongue, Gnarls Barkley - The Odd Couple, Tapes 'N Tapes - Walk It Off, The Stills - Oceans Will Rise, Coldplay - Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends

20. Q-Tip - The Renaissance: It's become tradition for me to include at least one hip-hop album in my year end lists, in a futile attempt to show that I listen to more than just indie rock. Former token representatives Common and Kanye West each released albums this year, and, well, let's just say neither contended for this list and leave it at that.

Instead, Q-Tip makes his triumphant return to the world of hip-hop in the appropriately-named The Renaissance, his first album since 1999 (and first work of his I've paid attention to since A Tribe Called Quest's Beats, Rhymes and Life from 1996). If you've been missing that old Quest sound, rejoice that the Abstract has returned with an album that stacks up to some of the best that group had to offer, while staking out new territory for itself.

19. Cat Power - Jukebox: Normally, cover albums are the death of artistry, the final sign that a singer has nothing new to offer, and instead tosses out a bunch of standards, hoping people will still pay to hear them sing even after they've tired of listening to what they have to sing about. But in the case of Cat Power, real creativity is applied to the songs Chan Marshall decides to cover (it helps that they aren't all standards).

It would take many lifetimes to see whether existence in the M83 galaxy was like his aural perception of it. In the second album as a solo project, M83 pursued a return to dreamlike music that he sought to make. Digital Shades, Vol. 1 is the first collection in a hopefully long series of ambient tracks.

Despite a run time of almost 36 minutes, Digital Shades is anything but brisk. Gonzalez perfectly juxtaposes each track so that the album blends just the right way. Often times, you'd swear you were listening to a single 36-minute song.

That's both positive and negative. As a whole, the album shouldn't have so many different parts that it would feel choppy and uneven. On the other hand, some tracks are only two to three minutes long, which diminishes the each track's ability to build and simply exist. This might work well, yet with something like "Strong And Wasted" (which runs just under two minutes), it seems more appropriate near the end as a sort of swan song, but being near the midpoint feels like it just comes and goes. Oddly, the latter point works on the ethereal and somewhat pseudo-pagan "Coloring The Void" and the romantic, yet poignant "By The Kiss."

Ambient, serene, or whatever you want to call it, M83 has created an enjoyable lightly-packed assortment of heavenly being. There are moments where the M83 hits the right spot, as in "Sister (Part 1)" and "Sister (Part 2)," but ultimately the album ends, leaving the listener not wanting more but just wanting.

Junior Wells was one bluesman who personified Chicago Blues, plus he recorded for Bob’s Delmark label in Chicago. He has a blues history that will keep you busy reading for weeks, so rather than re-invent the wheel, go do your homework.

The second on the roster, Sleepy John Estes was a Delta bluesman who recorded some blues back when there were records, and those records spun around on a turntable at 78-rpm (78 revolutions per minute), which means they were the really old stuff, Prewar, as that blues era is named. During the 1960s Blues Revival, Bob Koester was the guy who “found” Sleepy John Estes back in his homestate. Like Son House and Skip James and a host of others, Sleepy John made the rounds of the major blues festivals, including the Newport Festival which brought fans in droves, mostly college and college-age young people in search of the authentic blues and folk music.

Along with the aforementioned, there’s a great cross-section of names that will dig into your memory, including Detroit Jr., JB Hutto, Big Joe Williams, Roosevelt Sykes, Steve Freund, Otis Rush, Speckled Red, and Jimmy Burns. Several other prominent names round out the performers on this CD.

More than an hour of music, 17 cuts of good Chicago Blues.

And to add to your pleasure, there’s also a one-hour DVD that includes some current great Chicago blues assets. Tail Dragger opens and closes the DVD, with some exceptional talent in between. These are some of the top names in live Chicago area blues these days. One exceptional performance is that done by Jimmy Burns, whose second guitarist will blow you away. And I certainly don’t mean to short shrift any of the other talent on this DVD, because they’re all the most asked-for names in Chicago blues today.

And just think: You don’t have to mix your own tape. Delmark has gone and done it!

After a series of scandals involving photographs on the Internet, you'd think that "Hannah Montana" star Miley Cyrus would be careful about the photos she poses for.

But the Disney superstar is in hot water again, this time for a snapshot that leaked online late Monday in which she is pictured pulling at the corners of her eyes in a mock-Asian gesture amid a group of squinting friends, including an unidentified person of Asian descent.

George Wu, executive director of the national Asian Pacific American non-profit OCA released a statement on Monday in which he criticized the 16-year-old singer for her actions.

"The photograph of Miley Cyrus and other individuals slanting their eyes currently circulating the Internet is offensive to the Asian Pacific American community and sets a terrible example for her many young fans," Wu said. "This image falls within a long and unfortunate history of people mocking and denigrating individuals of Asian descent. Not only has Miley Cyrus and the other individuals in the photograph encouraged and legitimized the taunting and mocking of people of Asian descent, she has also insulted her many Asian Pacific American fans."

And, despite the fact that one of the men pictured in the photo appears to be of Asian descent, Wu said that alone does not make the gesture "acceptable." The OCA called for Cyrus — who recently performed at the Kids Inaugural concert in Washington, D.C. — to apologize to her fans and the Asian Pacific American community for her "lapse in judgment."

A spokesperson for Cyrus had not responded to requests for comment at press time.

Last summer, the Spanish Olympic basketball team was similarly ridiculed for making the gesture in a series of team photos, as was the Spanish tennis team.