Everything but the Girl – Idlewild (1988):  There are two framed album covers on our office wall that I salvaged from Hurricane Katrina.  One is the physical evidence from a story I never get tired of telling:  that practically the first album I picked up in the yard when I arrived there after the storm was a 12” single by Katrina and the Waves called “Do You Want Crying” (1985).  The other is the second album by the all-woman British post-punk band Marine Girls called Lazy Ways (1983).  I was experimenting with cleaning up that album cover, since it was fairly substantial, particularly for a European release; but I couldn’t fit the album into the cover after it dried.  I did not attempt to keep any other album covers.  Everything but the Girl is composed of Ben Watt and Tracey Thorn; Thorn was a member of Marine Girls previously, and Watt was the photographer for the Lazy Ways album cover.  Everything but the Girl is not really the style of music that appeals to me – near-acoustic musings primarily about relationships – but I love everything that EBTG has recorded.  One reason is that no one else sings like Tracey Thorn, and the songwriting and arrangements are top-drawer.  There is also a tough core to their music that is subtle but unmistakable to these ears – this is not what I would call soft rock at all.  Idlewild is the fourth album by Everything but the Girl and is an excellent introduction to their oeuvre.  There are no hits here, at least not in this country; they did not come along until the music by Everything but the Girl turned more electronic in the mid-1990’s.  Their big hit was “Missing” (1994), one of the very first songs to be re-released after being remixed, with the Todd Terry remix of “Missing” becoming a worldwide hit in 1995, peaking at #3 on the UK charts and #1 in Germany, and eventually reaching #2 on the American charts in 1996 and spending more than a year on the Billboard Hot 100.