I've listened long and hard to a lot of albums by a lot of singer-songwriters, from the medieval troubadours on up through the latest CDs. Based on my listening experience, I would single out two song-collections as the best of the bunch: Bob Dylan's Blood on the Tracks (1975) and Joni Mitchell's Blue (1972). In particular, I've been playing Blue repeatedly of late and I must say that it's close to a perfectly integrated expression of the troubadour ethos (what I like to call the individualism of the poet-musician).