Like pretty much every artist but the Beatles these days, if you want Brandi Shearer's new CD, 'Love Don't Make You Juliet,' all you have to do is open iTunes and add it to your cart. But if you want the new EP, 'Live at the Soiled Dove,' you're going to have to go to an indie record store and buy it in the flesh. Those who do, and play their cards right, will get the added bonus of seeing Shearer perform live, for free, while they peruse the record bins. Shearer has teamed up with the alliance that created Record Store Day for a national tour of indie shops. Entitled "Shore to Shore In-Store Tour," the jaunt kicks off Tuesday, Sept. 15 at Fingerprints in Long Beach, Calif.

"So here's the deal," Shearer tells Spinner. "So small was the town that I grew up in that there were no record stores. You could get some things at Payless, and I thought that was normal."

When Shearer finally made it to an actual record shop, she was floored. She also had a classic 'High Fidelity' moment: "The clerk asked what I liked and I told him Aretha Franklin, the only name I could pull out in an effort to sound remotely like I understood the contents of all those bins and boxes," she says. "I walked out with a battered, foxed, ancient copy of Joan Armatrading's 'Back to the Night,' his assurances that I would love it -- and do I! -- and a completely new perspective on music. And also the seeds of an extremely problematic financial issue in which I spent all my cash on music."

Yeah, that will happen. But it is fun to note that while both the CD and store-only EP will be retail-priced, the shows are completely free. That way, it not only helps the stores, it also hurts the scalpers.