Recently, in what can only be characterized as an irrevocable error, National Review editor in chief Rich Lowry made the same mistake on the Editors podcast that everyone else has been making for the last 25 years: discussing great singer-songwriters without having me present to offer my definitive opinion. Rich cabined his examination to American female singer-songwriters and arrived at Taylor Swift as the exemplar of the form. I’d say there’s no point in excluding Canadians — they are only as Canadian as we allow them to be, after all — and the answer is therefore transparently Joni Mitchell (who might as well be an honorary Californian anyway). And I’d argue that the gender barrier is artificial. Joni competes not with some subset of singer-songwriters but with the all-time greats of the English-speaking world: with Dylan, with Neil Young, Leonard Cohen, and Elvis Costello.

And with this guy: a fellow that you might not have heard of by the name of Nick Lowe. I don’t always promote episodes of my podcast Political Beats here on the Corner simply because, well, it’s a niche show for nerds who really love rock/pop/soul/other music and like to discourse on it at extreme length. But sometimes there’s a good reason to do so, and none better exists than to introduce some of our readers to Lowe, who went all the way from the English-pub-rock days of Brinsley Schwarz in the early 1970s to fronting a band with fellow British oddball Dave Edmunds, becoming house producer for one of the United Kingdom’s most famous and beloved punk-era indie labels, and starting his own wildly interesting solo career that is still going strong.

In America, Lowe is the proverbial one-hit wonder, with only a single Top 40 chart placement (1979’s sublimely melodic and biting “Cruel to Be Kind”) to his name. To the musical world (and especially the British musical world), however, he is the hub holding all the spokes together in the giant wheel of U.K. roots/new-wave/punk rock. Rockpile (his band with Edmunds) embodied the form and influenced of Bruce Springsteen’s The River and Born In The U.S.A. in multiple respects, while his production work gave us the classic years of Elvis Costello that we know and treasure today.

And his own work positively sparkles. A natural musical magpie, always keenly on the lookout for music and stories both fascinating and utterly ridiculous, Lowe showed early on, during his days as the lead singer, songwriter, and bassist for Brinsley Schwarz, that his understanding of songwriting combined a deep love of roots-rock with an abiding love of clever studio pop music. (One of Elvis Costello’s most beloved songs, “(What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding,” is a Nick Lowe song from the Brinsley Schwarz era that many mistake for one of Costello’s own.) Lowe believed in songcraft, in the joys of its formal virtues regardless of genre.

This made him uniquely able to play in all of them during the late Seventies. Lowe could co-write a song that sounded like an effortless Stax/Volt-era soul classic, then crank out a Chuck Berry pastiche every bit as good as one of Chuck’s, and then turn around and write “Bay City Rollers, We Love You.” (The song provides one of the origins of the legendary rock music joke about “being big in Japan” — Lowe released it under a pseudonym as an intentional piece of hackwork while he was working off the last year of a bad recording contract, and it instead went to No. 1 with a bullet in the charts in Japan.)

When the punk revolution came, he had the energy and authenticity to immediately inject it with the sort of incredible wit and songcraft heard on his debut album Jesus of Cool (an all-time title, that) and the follow-up Labour of Lust. Songs like “Marie Provost,” “So It Goes,” “I Love the Sound of Breaking Glass,” “American Squirm,” “Born Fighter,” and “Cruel to Be Kind” are among the finest formal compositions of the new-wave era, and that’s when he wasn’t handing instant standards (like this insanely catchy song) off to his rhythm guitarist to sing instead.

After an awkward middle age — drink and divorce both played their role; in general anyone spending that much time around Elvis Costello during the early Eighties was likely not making healthy lifestyle decisions — Lowe re-emerged in the Nineties. Older, silver-haired, and entirely comfortable in his skin, he released The Impossible Bird in 1994 and inaugurated the golden second half of his career, which continues to the present day with remarkable turns such as Dig My Mood and The Convincer. Lowe has never completely lost his new-wave era love of a clever or timeless pop hook, but now his roots sink far deeper into a beautifully well-calibrated but warm style of country/roots music and Americana. (For those who think it odd that a British singer-songwriter should so fully embrace country music, realize: This is the man who married Johnny Cash’s daughter in 1981. He wrote the “The Beast in Me,” his famous tribute to him, 13 years later.)

Lowe was and remains one of the greatest living songwriters and one whose later career has deepened his legacy enormously. (He remains absent from the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, but then nobody should ever care about being part of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.) And if any of this has piqued your interest, then I invite you to listen — perhaps in bite-sized portions — to three and a half hours of us discussing with love (and many, many song clips to illustrate) the vast sweep of his career. My co-host Scot and I had the privilege of being rejoined by former Wall Street Journal editor in chief Matt Murray (with whom we previously discussed Randy Newman and Talking Heads), which meant it was a discussion among genuinely committed fans. In addition, I have taken to making playlists on YouTube of the guests we cover for the show, so if you’re looking for a carefully assembled and sequenced primer, enjoy.

Hey — it beats spending another afternoon discussing Trump in the news.