The real appeal of downloads is that they’re the secret stuff that illustrates the age-old pop music truth that each fan must bond with their own music on a personal basis before it becomes everybody else’s favorite. Kinda like stock options. For musicians, offering music for download is also a way to make an art that’s personal, that doesn’t have to travel through commercial gatekeepers, tastemakers and moralists. It’s not an accident that Prodigal by Zeke Fishhead a.k.a. Ed Volker sounds so contemporary in a music landscape that includes the painful self expression of Cat Power and Connor Oberst. Volker is an eccentric, a poet and visual artist interested as much in the raw sensuality of sound and word-as-word as the literal velocity of his compositions, so his home studio productions, with their quirky one man band immediacy, are like a series of postcards from a friend lost out along the interstate. Volker chronicles his exile from New Orleans after Katrina in a mixture of Fellini-esque theme music that ruminates of the nuts and bolts of his life post-K, including a lamentation on the absence of Fred Neil records. He speaks most directly in the hair-raising “K,” with its haunting, deadpan refrain: “Where were you when the lights went out? / When the water rose and the souls froze? / Where were you when the lights went out? / When darkness fell and the bodies swelled?” Available from LiveDownloads.com.