Although he's almost 70, there's no slowing down Tom Jones, as the Welsh sex symbol returns with his first stateside album in 15 years. 24 Hours has just been released by S-Curve Records, and rather than take the sparse, dark, and pensive path of many of his seasoned, sunset peers, the new album is flawless, big-strutting, sweat-inducing Tom Jones fever!

For those of us who grew up thumbing through endless peach crates of vinyl records, the thrill of the hunt for coveted slabs of licorice pizza is still alive and forever under the skin. We may not feed the turntable as often or stumble in and out of the long-lost record stores of an earlier era, but the hunger is there. Downloading a selection from iTunes isn't the same as examining a wall of import seven-inch singles, finding the new bass player for your band in the aisles, or hearing Miles Davis for the first time on a battered tube-amp stereo.

When Lois Deloatch recorded what became Hymn to Freedom in late 2006, she intended it as a tribute to pianist Oscar Peterson, a living legend.

But one of the perils of being an independent artist is that albums done right require patience. "I'm a totally independent artist," the North Carolina-based Deloatch said earlier this week, in advance of her November 16 performance and workshop at the Redstone Room. "When you're literally doing every piece of it yourself, it takes a little bit of time."

Carrie Rodriguez has always gravitated toward the spotlight, even if it's taken a while to get there.

"My mother said that when I was in Montessori school, they would put on these plays," she recalled in a phone interview last week. "And I would always have the part of the tree or the plant or something. And my mom asked the teacher, 'Why do you keep giving Carrie the role of the tree?' And the Montessori-school teacher says, 'Because no matter what I do, Carrie's going to end up on the front of the stage, singing and dancing, so I can afford to give her the tree role. I need to give the shy kids the main roles.'"