“When Black Friday comes, I’ll stand down by the door,” sang Steely Dan; but for Black Friday here today, most are heading for the mall. Give music: an experience, a feeling. In alphabetical order, here are some gift-worthy recordings, some of which may turn up on our Best of 2008 top 10 list next month.

Ryan Adams & the Cardinals: “Cardinology” — “Evergreen” and “Like Yesterday” are pretty as anything on “American Beauty.” Other tunes are less Dead-like but just as effortless and strong. A skilled, rock band album by players beautifully cast in Adams’ audio movies.

Isabel Bayrakdarian: “Gomidas Songs” — Technically, Bayrakdarian is a classically trained mezzo-soprano, and this is a quietly orchestrated set of songs by Gomidas Vartabed. Forget technical: This is a sublime sonic distillation of a vanished nation’s (Armenia) longing to live and to love.

Beck: “Modern Guilt” — Danger Mouse brought beats and Beck made them songs: lighter songs than on “Sea Change” and better ones than on “Guero.” Beck saw the future in the rearview mirror: 1960s tie-dyed folk-rock and good-foot funk, with speed bumps of wry loneliness.

The B-52s: “Funplex” — You know in two bars who this is, and it makes you happy. They’re back at the love shack, these rock lobsters, to dance this mess around, again. It’s sexy fun deepened by age and loss.

The Bird and the Bee: “Ray Guns Are Not the Future” — A singer and a multi-instrumentalist make up maybe the cutest of all cute indie bands. They’re not the least bit precious, making a moody but often surprisingly big sound full of intelligence and imagination.

David Byrne and Brian Eno: “Everything that Happens Will Happen Today” — Richly detailed rock with simple visceral kick and inviting intimacy. Byrne has never sung better or written with more warmth, and the music unfolds like wise gifts. Good as his show at The Egg.

Ry Cooder: “I Flathead” — Third in his “California” trilogy and the richest and strangest. What happens to a restless culture that hadn’t yet (1950s and 1960s) learned any boundaries to its energies and desires? This music, that’s what, full of rockers and racers and other eccentrics, even a UFO or two.

Alejandro Escovedo: “Real Animal” — He played this at 11 a.m. at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, hypnotizing hungover fans dancing in puddles. At home, with or without a party, this rock about rocking will charge the room with joy. It turns feeling into sound, and vice versa.

“Floratone” — Guitarist Bill Frisell, drummer Matt Chamberlin and guests go deep into the Delta, and producers Tucker Martine and Lee Townsend give their swampy jams structure and sense. Impossible to play live, it still feels organic and rich in this precisely assembled studio masterpiece.

Eliza Gilkyson: “Beautiful World” — Another masterpiece like her “Paradise Hotel” — sweet and deep troubadour tunes, Texas style (folk, swing, and rock), sung in a beautiful, breathy voice.

Emmylou Harris: “All I Intended to Be” — Laid-back or slower, mostly acoustic, elegant folk-country, with Harris in great voice, singing with admirers who give her their best.

John Legend — “Evolver” The title means it: He keeps getting better; smoother, more curious and confident. On this well-made R&B caress-fest, he’s the sincere seducer, exposed and eager, except on the kiss-off “It’s Over,” a spicy taste of snide.

Gary Louris: “Vagabonds” — The ex-Jayhawk leader goes solo, with early-Jayhawk-like (circa “Hollywood Town Hall”) results, but a somewhat wider musical palette. Louris writes fearlessly pretty melodies and sings with a sweetness that never feels forced, even when he reaches for wise, and hits it.

James McMurtry: “Just Us Kids” — Robert Christgau calls this fierce, and it is, in sound and sense. Powerfully political at times, as in “Cheney’s Toy” it may be even better when it’s purely personal, and best yet when it’s both as in “Ruby and Carlos,”

John Mellencamp: “Life, Death, Love & Freedom” — Sounding at times as if he’s channeling John Prine, he’s getting older, sensing the end of his time here to experience the indignation that makes him an artist. Populism with a folk-rock vocabulary, powered by pure persistence and passion.

Randy Newman: “Harps and Angels” — His best since “Sail Away.” He went back to New Orleans and didn’t like what he saw and what it said to him about America: an embarrassment he hopes maybe not be irredeemable.

Of Montreal: “Skeletal Lamping” — Kevin Barnes goes global with his influences on this (mostly) one-man band, wide-screen sonic cinema with fully realized characters, odd atmospheres and startling stories: romances, travelogues, crime stories, horror movies and moody, surrealistic fables.

Orchestra Baobab: “Made in Dakar” — Afro-Cuban in an unexpected way: They formed in Senegal in 1970, inspired by suave, jazzy Cuban dance music and their own folkloric griot tradition. This weave is rich in both threads, and seamless. Nobody could doubt soul and jazz started in Africa after hearing this.

Andy Palacio & the Garifuna Collective: “Watina” — Caribbean worldbeat that was just about to break big here, but Palacio died just before his first U.S. tour began, making this the year’s most tragic/tremendous magical musical obituary.

Raphael Saadiq: “The Way I See It” — Singing and thinking like Marvin Gaye, he goes retro here, soulfully. He rocks with tremendous assurance and hits every goal he targets with his amazing talent.

Jenny Scheinman: “Crossing the Field” and “Jenny Scheinman” — The former: jazz instrumentals starring her violin; the latter: a violin-powered singer-songwriter album. Both are brilliant, as she was with her jazz trio at the Freihofer’s Jazz Festival and in Rodney Crowell’s country-folk acoustic trio.

Esperanza Spalding: “Esperanza”— The prodigious young bassist-singer-songwriter compresses wild jazz intelligence, focused songwriting vision and precocious performing aplomb onto an endlessly surprising journey.

The subdudes: “Live at the Ram’s Head; Unplugged at Pleasant Plains” — The only DVD set on this list, it’ s informally, almost amateurishly, shot yet completely full of authentic down-home soul. A concert DVD and a living room DVD, together: delicious.

Otis Taylor: “Recapturing the Banjo” — Before there was bluegrass, there was blues and Taylor, a blues traditionalist so rigorous he sounds revolutionary, recaptures the banjo’s fierceness and fire.

Rokia Traore: “Tchamantche” — Haunting and heart-lifting Afro-pop that dances on the border between the traditional (its mostly acoustic sound and song structures) and the fearlessly experimental. An exceptional voice and vision.

TV on the Radio: “Dear Science” — This year’s “Neon Bible” in terms of bold ambition and faultless, multi-faceted accomplishment, by a mostly African-American band that began where Living Colour and the other Black Rock Coalition bands ended. Big and beautiful, and rocking.

Lizz Wright: “The Orchard” — One of the great voices of our time, and more soulful and soaring each time out. She knows how to choose just the right songs for her buttery alto, and how to live inside each one.

The best musical gift may be concert tickets: music free of stereo, car or iPod. If you know your giftee loves Richard Thompson, just wait for his next show, for example. Otherwise, give a gift membership and/or gift certificate to a venue: something superb will surely turn up soon.