Grant-Lee Phillips Virginia Creeper (Cooking Vinyl COOKCD292) PHILLIPS has been playing Americana since long before you could find a section called that in record stores. His former band, Grant Lee Buffalo, was championed by Michael Stipe, and anyone who considers Automatic for the People to be REM’s high point should introduce themselves to Phillips’s work. Start with his solo outing, Mobilize, and you’ll find a frisky, funky and instantly catchy sensibility, but on Virginia Creeper, we get the more typical, bittersweet, acoustic Phillips, with lovingly crafted lyrics nestling comfortably between banjos and violins. A cover of Gram Parsons’s "Hickory Wind" closes the album — perfectly in keeping with Phillips’s own songs. -- Mark Edwards

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