From the author of so many finely crafted and beautifully melancholic LPs, the all-covers disc My Favorite Waste of Time might just be Freedy Johnston’s loosest and warmest effort to date.

“They’re all pop gems, as you can see,” explains Freedy of the album’s diverse track list, with tunes by Bacharach, Petty, Porter, McCartney (twice) and Matthew Sweet among those represented. “Most of them are upbeat lyrically. Maybe I had to do a cover record to do upbeat songs!”

Perhaps. Yet while the material here is culled from Freedy’s own personal fan file, it all still sounds so unmistakably… Freedy. Credit that to what Rolling Stone called the singer songwriter’s “defiantly idiosyncratic singing voice,” as well as Freedy’s history playing and reworking most of these songs as part of his live set.