As Amos' (ever so much) younger sister, I'm his earliest fan. I've listened to him with lots of love and joy all my life, ever since he taught himself guitar as a young teenager, learning some of his first numbers from the Burl Ives records in our playroom. So I was very tickled to find his cd "Beyond the Lighthouse" in my mailbox a while ago. I figured it would be good old familiar Amos singing good old familiar folk songs. Well, it's actually far better than that. All the songs and all the cuts are beautiful -- their lyrics, their tunes, and their execution. He chose wonderfully, and he's singing wonderfully. He's in better voice than he has been in years (due in part, I'd guess, to his victory over the demon Cigarettes which he'd been addicted to almost as long as he's played the guitar). If you haven't heard Amos sing, I urge you to give yourself a treat. He has a lovely warm, cheerful bass voice, a little like Gordon Bok if he'd had some really great news. None of the cuts on this CD are old or early Amos repertoire; not that they're new, but I haven't heard Amos perform them before. He does numbers as disparate as "The Rose" and "The Glory Trail," and songwriters as varied as Townes Van Zandt and Christine Lavin. One of the cuts is Amos' own composition, and anyone who's read any of the old Song Challenge threads knows that he's a genius poet/wordsmith -- and this song holds up very well, even surrounded by such stellar company. (When I first heard it, the family-critic in me was carping "mixed metaphors, Amos!" -- but the more I listen to it the less I can criticize it and the more I like it.) I've had this CD in my car CD player for a week, and I spend about an hour in my car on a normal workday. I'm not tired of it yet. Every day at work, I find myself humming the last number I heard, for hours. I haven't yet gotten to the point where I skip over a particular cut, because there's none that I've lost interest in. It's a great CD and I'm thrilled to have it. I want a bunch more, to send to my kids and cousins. I don't know how you order it, but my guess is you could send him a PM.

Sister's proud plug