What Goes In Bob's CD Player?

Below is a question posed to Bob on an open forum on Prodigy. The italics are the other person's questions and comments to Bob. Bob's response follows.

I'm not up on a lot of what is happening in CCM right now. Some of that has to do with my being in L.A. instead of Nashville. I try to listen fairly broadly and, as a songwriter, I find a lot of good work being done outside the CCM genre. I also have a great interest in artists who are Christians, but don't make CCM records. There is something about the creativity and subtlety of many of those artists that appeals to me. Good examples of this would be Bruce Cockburn, Pierce Pettis, T-Bone Burnett ... But, the best $15.00 I spent in 1995 was for an album called "Tapping The Wheel" by an artist named Jane Kelly Williams. (The album is on a singer/songwriter label called Parachute Records, distributed by Mercury Records.You won't likely find it in a Christian bookstore, you'll have to hunt it up or order it from a Tower Records, Best Buy, Borders or the like. My absolute favorite artist whose album were more well known in the CCM market is the late Mark Heard. A lot of his earlier stuff is out of print, but his later albums were done for New England-based Fingerprint Records. You should be able to enter the label name in a search engine and get to their web page.

Other artists that I always pay attention to are Michael Card, Phil Keaggy, Bruce Carroll, Billy Sprague and Kelly Willard. The earliest CCM album that I remember really opening up the possibilities of lyrical creativity was an out-of-print Maranatha! Music album (1979?) by Erick Nelson and Michele Pillar called "The Misfit".