To be honest, we rarely venture away from the Billboard Top 200 albums chart. The singles charts are littered with decade-old Nine Inch Nails releases, while the ringtones chart still strikes us as kinda silly. Today, however, we discovered that the strangest chart is clearly Contemporary Jazz, as The Weather Channel Presents Smooth Jazz is now riding number two there. To answer your first question, the Weather Channel album collects a bunch of the smooth-jazz tracks the station plays during their “Local on the 8s” segments. Supposedly, the station’s music has a huge following, ranging from John Tesh devotees to Phish-heads. “Phish fans were coming out of the woodwork the first time we played one of their songs,” says Steve Hurst, who programs the channel’s music. The Weather Channel plays Phish songs? We would watch to see for ourselves if, you know, they didn’t show weather maps and forecasts twenty-four hours a day. Then again, people aren’t seeing music on MTV anymore, so they have to get their fix from somewhere. We’re almost as confused by this as we are about Janet Reno’s Song of America box set (who knew the former Attorney General was a closet Devendra Banhart fan?)

In an effort to find the appeal in this CD, and why anyone would throw down money for this, we went to the source: Amazon.com customer reviews. Of the eight customer reviews on the site, six give the collection five out of five stars. That’s Citizen Kane-like approval! Jonathan Nowak of Nashville says, “Each song is crafted amazingly well, and the performers give an enchanting performance on each track.” While Jeff Carter of Perry, Georgia, is “very pleased” with the collections, he adds, “The only dissapointment I have is that ‘Dancing In My Heart’ by Chris Camozzi wasn’t included.I use to love hearing it played.I hope it will make the next cd.” Amazon evidently needs to spend less time on the price-cutting and more time on the copy-editing. But Jeff is right: Thanks to the success of this album, the Weather Channel will spawn more discs, culminating in the inevitable The Weather Channel Presents Indie Rock.