If the other Elvis P. had been on NPR, his black velvet image would likely be hanging in a different class of living room.

On Thursday, NPR ran a show featuring Elvis Perkin's (the son of Anthony Perkins, from Psycho) latest indie album release, Elvis Perkins in Dearland.

The album had everything a typical NPR listener could want: low exposure and an attending sense of "ingenuity" and "a genuine feel"; mysterious lyrics that went down easy with a folksy tune ("123 Goodbye"); a charming anecdote told by a somewhat shy, somewhat reclusive, non-overly-analytical artist, about how he'd meant "Doomsday" to be a dirge, but the almost accidental acquisition of a marching bass drum had changed all that, making the song 350% more charming, and a bit ironic.

So like every other person who happened to be listening to NPR that morning, I went to Amazon.com the next day and looked up the album. I liked "Doomsday's" sense of marching gleefully into the fray of the Apocalypse, and with my preoccupation with Apocamixes, how could I resist?

Apparently nobody else could, either. Elvis Perkins in Dearland was not only the top folk album download for the day, it was the 29th top download, period. And the CD was just past the top 30 sellers for the day, despite its being $4.50 more than the mp3 download. (But that's not surprising; classy listeners like to have the physical CD -- it has the cultural cache of owning vinyl, now.) The wait for CD shipping was 1-3 weeks.

That is the power, apparently, of NPR...at least over things that NPR listeners deem charming or endearing in some way, things where the only stakes are being deemed stylish or not rather than "significance" or "policy."