Jad Fair

With his wildly influential band Half Japanese or as a solo performer, Jad Fair has constructed a prolific and extremely interesting career. He writes and records songs that display an uncomplicated emotional directness, unselfconscious (almost hokey) charm and warmth, and a genial simplicity that is beyond words. Fair's later recordings are certainly more accessible -- in some ways resembling those of another great American primitive, Jonathan Richman -- but his stock-in-trade is still the ability to compose and play music without conventional command of an instrument. Althou...