THE FIRST TIME I played "Desperado," from the Langley Schools Music Project CD, Innocence and Despair, for my wife, Robin, she was hooked. I could almost feel the flush of poignant recognition rising up from her heart through her throat to her head. I can't say for sure what she recognized, beyond the advertised and palpable "innocence" of the vocal performance by a nine-year-old Canadian schoolgirl named Sheila Behman, with muffled piano accompaniment from her music teacher.

Whatever, the experience caused her to demand that we take the CD with us every time we visited friends during the holiday season and make them pay full attention as we played the reimagined Eagles track for them, usually followed by young Joy Jackson's almost equally devastating rendition of "The Long and Winding Road."

Since its release last October, the Langley Schools Project album has assumed a kind of iconic cult status that cannot be attributed simply to mere novelty or profound musical ingenuity. Innocence and Despair's allure arises from something both simpler and more complex. For collectors of what archivist of the arcane Irwin Chusid calls "outsider music," the story of the Langley Schools Project may be compelling enough to buy the CD. The cohost of The Incorrect Music Hour on radio station WFMU-FM, the author of Songs in the Key of Z, and an early booster in the rediscoveries of Esquivel and Raymond Scott, Chusid was sent a tape that included a version of David Bowie's "Space Oddity" performed by a 60-voice school chorus from a rural school district in British Columbia. Chusid's sleuthing turned up the music teacher, one Hans Fenger, and a total of 21 recordings, from 1976 to 1977, by children in the Langley School District. An itinerant educator in provincial Canada, Fenger used the theories and instruments of Carl Orff in his teaching and believed that kids would be more enthusiastic about learning music if they could perform familiar pop radio fare. So he had them sing "Venus and Mars/Rock Show" and "Band on the Run," by Wings, "Saturday Night," by the Bay City Rollers, Fleetwood Mac's "Rhiannon," Neil Diamond's "Sweet Caroline," and a whole lot of Beach Boys. Chusid had the recordings remastered from the original vinyl LPs and convinced Basta Audio-Visuals in the Netherlands and Bar/None Records in the United States to issue the CD.

In his liner notes Chusid describes the way the music "conflates elements of garage rock, gospel, minimalism, and folk art," and the way the "instruments reverberate at odd moments, then disappear" to create "a musical panorama of dynamic peaks and valleys, with delicate textures careening into bursts of exuberance."

But I think most people are drawn to something even deeper and more primal about the Langley Schools Music Project. As Martha C. Nussbaum writes in her challenging new book, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions, "Any good analysis of the expressive properties of music must ground itself in the specifically musical properties of the work." Chusid takes pretty good care of that for us. But Nussbaum also notes that music "digs into our depths and expresses hidden movements of love and fear and joy that are inside us. It speaks to us and about us in mysterious ways, going 'to the bottom of things,' as Mahler put it, exposing hidden vulnerabilities and, so to speak, laying our souls open to our view."

What's so unique and magical about Innocence and Despair is that while Fenger's students may have "cherished songs that evoked loneliness and sadness," as he argues in his liner-note reminiscences, they don't sound as if they identify with the words.