There is no disputing that Sean Ryan is inexperienced. He's a senior at Augustana College, and he nearly boasts that the songs on his debut album, Lonesome Driver Music, were dashed off and barely touched again.

"I don't think I've ever spent more than 10 minutes writing a song before," he said in an interview - his first, he said - in September. He added that he only changed a handful of lines from initial composition to final recording.

There's a lot to announce this week, after a few weeks of corresponding hiatus. First and foremost, starting this week, Daytrotter.com will be posting one brand new exclusive recording session seven days a week. Every day this month we're going to try to embody the holiday spirit more and more. If this trial month goes well, we'll continue the seven-days-a-week-of-new-session-posting throughout 2009. That would mean 365 days of sessions and at least 1,460 free songs. We hope that this makes you happy.

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.