Odd Thomas 2013

As one of the biggest-selling artists of all time, perhaps it was only a matter of time before Billy Joel was subjected to a romantically themed collection, and so came She's Got a Way: Love Songs, released just in time for Valentine's Day 2013. This 18-track collection reveals an odd truth about Joel: he didn't write all that many love songs. A few of his biggest hits are love songs but only a few: the early song "She's Got a Way," which wasn't a hit until its Songs in the Attic incarnation in the early '80s; "Just the Way You Are," an unabashedly romantic soft rock staple that helped make him a star in the mid-'70s; "This Is the Time," a gently nostalgic song from The Bridge; "The Night Is Still Young," an added cut to 1986's Greatest Hits, Vols. 1 & 2.

If Brad Paisley signaled a tentative stylistic retreat via the title of 2011's This Is Country Music, the name of its 2013 sequel, Wheelhouse, is a fake-out. By no means is he returning to familiar territory here; he's stepping far outside his "Southern Comfort Zone," as Paisley puts it on the record's first single. There, he admits how he misses his Tennessee home but he's seen the ways he's grown and never would have seen the world without leaving what he already knew, a kind of self-evident truth that passes for a major revelation in the polarized world of 2013, where residents of both red and blue states are very happy within the confines of their county.