by SHANE SINNOTT

Welcome to 2008, the Year of the Rat. This is also going to be the year, I daresay, of all sorts of crazy shit happening with the godawful music industry. An orgy of consumer choice is in store, friends, and the idea of paying for something you haven’t heard is going to soon seem preposterous. On that note, be sure you download some tracks from the upcoming Cat Power album Jukebox before shelling out to Matador. Chan Marshall is back to covers with this record—here’s the theme from New York, New York, made famous by Frank Sinatra: tinyurl.com/3839ue.

In fact, let’s keep going with this covers thing. If you surf your way over to tinyurl.com/3yxc49, you can get “Sexual Healing” as covered by Hot Chip. It’s worth a listen for the curiosity factor alone, though I’m finding the shudder-inducing image of 20-year-old hipsters seducing each other to it hard to shake. How about Grizzly Bear, then? At tinyurl.com/2wzves, you can get the Crystals cover “He Hit Me (It Felt Like a Kiss),” which I’m thinking is more appropriate to seduction for the 25-and-over age bracket. And if you’re trying to seduce someone over 40 in this new year, there’s the Grizzly Bear cover of the Yes song “Owner of a Lonely Heart” at tinyurl.com/36pndn.

If you’re up for something a little softer, you can get the version of Paul Simon’s “Me and Julio Down By the Schoolyard” as sung by Julie Doiron, which works a lot better than you think it would, at tinyurl.com/2myal5 (note that Doiron joins Lily Frost at la Sala Rossa this Friday, Jan. 11). And if you’d like to depress yourself a little bit as we move towards February—and who doesn’t?—I’d recommend listening to Joe Henry sing the Velvet Underground classic “Pale Blue Eyes,” which contains the devastating line, “Thought of you as everything/I’ve had but couldn’t keep.” That’s at tinyurl.com/2nb5so. Finally, a requisite cover of “Hallelujah” by Leonard Cohen—you can get it sung by John Cale at tinyurl.com/2sucyk. It’s no Rufus Wainwright (tinyurl.com/2ugq7c), but it’ll do.