REO Speedwagon lead singer and primary songwriter Kevin Cronin said the band spent more than three years making Find Your Own Way Home, which came out last year. "There was no pressure to release it sooner," he said last week. "There was no record company, no contract, none of that bullshit. It was strictly a labor of love on our part."

There's something to be said for those minds that tilt sideways and see mankind through the lens of Kant, Kierkegaard and Sartre. For eight years now the academics at Chicago's Open Court Publishing have wet their quills in the zeitgeist of modern icons in their Popular Culture & Philosophy series, dismantling everything from Quentin Tarantino and Monty Python to The Sopranos and the Atkins Diet. With previous volumes on Bob Dylan, U2, and the Grateful Dead, the book series has taken on the grandest of all rock bands, lifting Pink Floyd up for pontification in Aristotle's garden. Subtitled Careful With That Axiom, Eugene!, Pink Floyd & Philosophy is a heady 300-page rush of essays by 19 department chairs, professors, and freelancers.

With a rush like the first road trip of spring, the B-52s are back next week after a decade of silence with a rousting bop-'til-you-drop CD. Titled Funplex, the floor-shaking Astralwerks release is a time trip to the golden era of carefree college radio, with the beehive harmony sway of Kate Pierson and Cindy Wilson and the unique vocal styling of Fred Schneider, cutting through today's gloomy emo haze with a love-shack karate chop to the sacroiliac. Helmed by Keith Strickland, the band's original drummer who picked up main guitar duties after the death of Ricky Wilson in 1985, highlights on the hook-heavy disc include the afternoon delight of "Ultraviolet," the martini-mile drive of "Deviant Ingredient," and the meet-me-at-the-mall hedonistic sass of the title track.

While critics are gushing over Cat Power's recent all-covers collection Jukebox, my pick for the cover-girl showdown is this coming Tuesday's release of Mockingbird by Allison Moorer. Opening up with the album's only original (and title track), 11 covers of songs by women fill out the lady-power salute, even slipping in to Cat Power's own "Where Is My Love." Plucking from the songbook of the greatest women songwriters, selections range from Patti Smith's "Dancing Barefoot" to Gillian Welch's "Revelator" to Joni Mitchell's "Both Sides Now." Recorded in a breezy week at producer Buddy Miller's Dogtown Studio, highlights also include Ma Rainey's "Daddy, Goodbye Blues" (featuring Moorer's husband, Steve Earle, on roots guitar) and the enraptured pine of Nina Simone's "I Want a Little Sugar In My Bowl."