Peter Case

Music genres are ghettoized for long stretches, and it seems none more so than folk. So while Peter Case has been making wonderful rootsy pop as a solo artist for two decades, he's received only a fraction of his due. Of course, Case scored big almost out of the box with the Nerves, helping write "Hanging on the Telephone," which Blondie turned into a hit. Then the Plimsouls scored another of new wave's compilation classics with "A Million Miles Away," featured in the early Nicolas Cage classic, Valley Girl.

But that was an entire career ago, and though Case's songs feature the same canny mix of wordplay and bubbling, flat-picking folk-pop made famous by the Byrds, nowadays we're listening to tuneless disco-synth bands, not power pop. Perhaps Case's compilation You're Going to Go Your Crooked Mile will make some headway toward correcting the karmic imbalance. Released 18 months ago, it culls 16 songs from this pop craftsman's catalog.