Stars Beneath My Feet is a greatest-hits compilation from English singer/songwriter James Blunt. Along with some of his most well-known tracks, including "You're Beautiful" and "Cold," the record features four original songs as well as a selection of live performances.© Liam Martin /TiVo

Cher's mid-'90s album It's a Man's World can safely be labeled as one of the singer's finest, as well as one of her most overlooked and underappreciated albums. Full of steamy, torchy ballads, Western-themed epics, and R&B influences, the album finds the singer sounding vocally relaxed and self-assured. Around this time, Madonna made an album of heavily R&B-influenced material (Bedtime Stories) to capitalize on the mid-'90s R&B/pop phenomenon (when Boyz II Men and all their clones ruled the music charts); this album could be classified as Cher's similar effort. "One by One," the album's opener (and first single), is an irresistible, mid-tempo soul number that never made the American Top 40, yet became a club hit in its remixed form. The original album version, however, is decidedly superior. She also includes several covers, among them Don Henley's 1985 hit "Not Enough Love in the World" as well as a rousing rendition of Marc Cohn's "Walking in Memphis," which became an international hit. The real highlights, however, are the set's three closers. "The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine Anymore" is epic and beautiful, complete with echoes of the Wild West, which then lead into the similarly Western, and extremely steamy "The Gunman," and ends with a smoldering version of James Brown's "It's a Man's Man's Man's World." This is Cher at her best, and bridges the gap between late '80s/early '90s faux metal-babe Cher and her 1999 dance-club comeback album Believe. This album is also available in a better (and more expensive) import version, which includes three extra tracks and features different mixes of the first five songs.© Jose F. Promis /TiVo

Standing on top of a mountain of hype and praise after the success of their first two self-released albums, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah did what few bands in their position would do: they took a break. Rather than striking while the iron was hot and getting another release into the impatient little hands of their fan base, they walked away to pursue other projects, allowing their members to follow all of their other ideas wherever they might take them for a couple years before eventually coming back together on their third album, Hysterical. With a generally brighter and more focused approach, the band returns to the formula of their debut, delivering an album of solid indie rock that focuses more on songwriting than experimentation. Instead of the blown-out fuzz of Some Loud Thunder’s opening track, Hysterical kicks off with the soothing atmospherics of “Same Mistake,” which offers up plenty of drama while still giving listeners something to dance to. The real highlight of the albums comes by way of the thumping tension of “Maniac,” a song that’s propelled forward by nervous energy, as Alec Ounsworth seems to channel the paranoid vocals of Clinic’s Ade Blackburn. If there’s anything bad to say about Clap Your Hands Say Yeah’s hiatus, it’s that it seems as if they’re a bit hesitant to start experimenting again. The album stays firmly planted in the post-punk/synth pop wheelhouse, which means that it’s incredibly consistent, but not necessarily surprising, which could be a good or bad thing for fans, depending on whether they prefer their debut or their sophomore album. Fortunately, this area is one that the band excels in, making Hysterical an album that’s kind of like musical comfort food, satisfying without perplexing. © Gregory Heaney /TiVo

In the field of country music, where most artists are not also songwriters, there is a constant search among the Nashville publishing houses for that one song that will not only catapult a singer to the top of the charts, but also define a career. After a slow build lasting nearly a decade, Reba McEntire became an established country star in the mid-'80s, winning the Female Vocalist of the Year award from the Country Music Association in 1984 and again in 1985. But she had never had even a Top Ten LP on the country charts, and her successes seemed to vie with her failures in a back-and-forth pattern. She had turned to the new traditionalist style with her 1984 album My Kind of Country, and seemed to have hit on a theme of embodying the emotional conflicts of women with "Somebody Should Leave," a song from that disc that went to number one. But Have I Got a Deal for You in 1985 missed the mark. Whoever's in New England, which followed in early 1986, was a bull's-eye. The first reason was, of course, the title song, written by Kendal Franceschi and Quentin Powers, and sung by McEntire with the clenched emotion that the lyrics required. Against a stately ballad setting, the singer embodies the character of a Southern wife whose husband is, it seems to her, taking more business trips to Boston than he really needs to. Her surprising response is to tell him she thinks he's cheating on her, but that "when whoever's in New England's through with you," she will be waiting for him. The singer's sense of martyrdom is both unbearable and irresistible, and Franceschi and Powers achieve the added effect of casting the story in a South vs. North context. A mere 121 years since the end of the Civil War, that's a subtext that remained compelling to Southerners."Whoever's in New England," which quickly soared to number one on the country singles charts (and later won McEntire her first Grammy for Best Female Country Vocal Performance), was reason enough for the album named after it to be considered a triumph. But producers McEntire and Jimmy Bowen surrounded it with other material of a similar ilk, female-oriented ballads like "You Can Take the Wings Off Me," "I'll Believe It When I Feel It," "I've Seen Better Days," "If You Only Knew," and "Don't Touch Me There" that explored women's emotional turmoil as they tried to navigate the troubled seas of romance. In "If You Only Knew," for example, a single woman counseled a married one that, however rocky things might get, having a husband was infinitely better than being alone as she was. And in "You Can Take the Wings Off Me," a woman submitted to seduction rather than continue to be a chaste angel, but not without a somewhat solemn and mournful feeling about it. (Either of these songs could have been a chart hit on its own if released as a single.) McEntire and Bowen threw in some up-tempo material for contrast, beginning with the frisky honky tonk number "I Can't Stop Now"; leading off the LP's side two with the cheery cheating song "Little Rock" (another number-one hit); and providing the requisite Western swing romp with "One Thin Dime." But it was the big ballads that were at the heart of Whoever's in New England, and they sold Reba McEntire to her female country constituency once and for all. The singer who'd never had a Top Ten album before went straight to number one with this one.© William Ruhlmann /TiVo