North Carolina?

155 years after its publication, the phrase “Paradise of Bachelors” graced the spine of the first album released by a couple of Tar Heel Staters — Brendan Greaves and Jason Perlmutter — who had no idea they were launching one of the most promising labels in the Southeast, arguably the entire country. “What a title for a story, especially one by an author we consider to be a paragon of American literary excellence,” says Greaves, co-founder and Melville fan. “I just thought the title was so compelling and humorous. That was my primary justification.”

It might seem like an odd literary reference for a label so focused on American — specifically North Carolinian — regional music, but Greaves says the name has taken on new weight and significance since its first release, a compilation of homegrown soul songs written, produced and originally released by a stereo salesman named David Lee. “It’s a story about labor,” he says. “That idea appealed to me because when I was in grad school, I wrote a bit about labor lore and occupational booklets — the culture and everyday experiences of work among Americans. And in retrospect, the fact that half the story is about lawyers has become particularly relevant. You deal with lawyers a lot in this business, and that can be both educational and extraordinarily frustrating.”

Neither Greaves nor Perlmutter (who runs the site Carolinasoul.org) had high expectations for their 2010 maiden release, Said I Had a Vision: Songs & Labels of David Lee, 1960-1988, but surprisingly, it sold out before it even hit stores. “We thought maybe we’ve got something here,” recalls Greaves, “maybe we can do another project.” Next on the docket was Poor Moon, the new album by the Durham-based band Hiss Golden Messenger.

As the label grew and matured, Greaves and his new partner, Christopher Smith (late of the band Espers) would work to maintain a sharp balance between intriguing new music (such as the self-titled debut from Nashville folk-rock upstarts Promised Land) and fascinating archival releases (such as Chance Martin’s Music Row obscurity/absurdity In Search). “I’d like to braid the two together in a compelling way,” says Greaves. “I’m interested in older music to the extent that there’s more of it. There’s a lot yet to be discovered.”

Based in Durham, Greaves — a New Englander who moved to North Carolina to study folklore — handles copyright research, oversees most of the graphic design, and writes liner notes. His wife Samantha handles the bookkeeping, and Smith (based in Philadelphia) is in charge of A&R and artist management. “That’s his background. Through Espers, he has had intensive tour experience and understands these matters from the artist’s perspective. I don’t really have that. It’s a shared burden.”

Despite the many miles in between Greaves and Smith, Paradise of Bachelors remains entrenched in the culture and traditions of North Carolina and is becoming an increasing presence in the bustling Tar Heel scene. “One could argue that North Carolina is the birthplace of country music in a broad sense,” says Greaves. “There were a lot of important early country recordings in Charlotte before Nashville took control of everything. All the old-time banjo music string-band traditions, all the bluegrass traditions came from here. And then there’s this amazing wealth of African-American musical traditions, both secular and sacred.” He sees local acts like Hiss Golden Messenger, Megafaun, and Horseback as continuations of those traditions.

Even so, as Paradise of Bachelors grows, Greaves understands that its scope will transcend state lines. In fact, the label is planning a new set of reissues for a UK artist, which would fulfill the transatlantic nature of its namesake story. “We’d like to maintain and even accelerate our pace,” he explains,” without losing attention to detail or our ability to represent our artists effectively and accurately.”

Speaking by phone from his home in North Carolina, Greaves elaborated on some the label’s small, but growing catalog.

Her defiantly impressionistic style reaches a peak

Neko Case has spent the last 15 years perfecting both a dark strain of alt-country and a lyrical style that rejects songwriting conventions in order to build up wholly new personal mythologies. As her songs have grown moodier and more cinematic, Case has become less willing to state anything outright, instead finding ever more circuitous routes around her subjects. Hers is a defiantly impressionistic style, both withholding and revealing, and it reaches a peak on her latest album, The Worse Things Get, the Harder I Fight, the Harder I Fight, the More I Love You.

Despite a title that might leave Fiona Apple shaking her head, Case’s idiosyncratic record yields lovely and chilling moments. “Calling Cards” builds to a curious confession — “I’ve got calling cards from 20 years ago” — yet Case takes what sounds like a banal line about her hoarding tendencies and turns it into a devastating declaration of love and friendship, set to a lighter-than-air arrangement. “Man” is the most New Pornographic she’s sounded by herself, and “Night Still Comes” gains its considerable power from both her electric vocals and from her skewed imagery about puking up sonnets and the oblique accusation “You never held me at the right angle.” Who is addressing who, exactly, is up to the listener to decide.

And yet, The Worse Things Get contains a few of Case’s most direct tunes, such as the touring diary “I’m From Nowhere” and the murder ballad “Bracing for Sunday” (with its succinct confession, “he died because I murdered him”). The a cappella “Nearly Midnight, Honolulu” splits the album down the middle, with no discernible verse of chorus but some surprisingly frank lyrics. Singing about a child abused by her mother, Case multiplies her voice sympathetically, as though summoning an army to protect the kid. It’s so plainspoken that it veers toward artless, but for Case it’s an endeavor of enormous empathy, which is the engine that drives that mighty voice.

Love is a battlefield on the Civil Wars' sophomore album

Thanks to the austere folk instrumentation and the sepia-toned imagery on Barton Hollow, their 2011 debut, the Civil Wars have been lumped in with new old-time revivalists like the Avett Brothers and Mumford & Sons, but the duo has never been quite comfortable among the overalls-and-trucker-hats set. On their self-titled follow-up, Joy Williams and John Paul White distance themselves from that acoustic/authentic movement with a rawer, harder, darker sound that makes room for abrasive electric guitars and stoical programmed beats. There are quiet numbers here, like “Dust to Dust” and the nearly unrecognizable Smashing Pumpkins cover “Disarm,” which don’t stray too far from the plaintive strumming and pillow-talk harmonies of their debut. But on The Civil Wars those songs contrast dramatically with surprisingly heavy numbers like “I Had Me a Girl” and “Eavesdrop.” First single “The One That Got Away” could be a demo for a metal tune, as the percussive riffs and unsettling silences convey the horrors of soured love. Ratcheting up the rural-gothic drama and sexual tension to a nearly operatic level, Williams and White may be accused of sounding overwrought. Yet, such baroque intensity suits them well, as The Civil Wars not only offers a compelling expansion of their sound but also definitively distinguishes them from their musically conservative peers.

Strange and spry country with eccentricities running wild

When Amanda Shires sings about the devil on “Deep Dark Below,” a standout on her latest album, he “plays a mean fiddle and his bow’s made of bone.” The Texas native plays a mean bow herself: She joined the Texas Playboys at 15 and has backed an array of musicians, including Justin Townes Earle, Todd Snider and her husband Jason Isbell. Members of his band the 400 Unit back her on Down Fell the Doves, creating a strange and spry country sound that fits her fantastical lyrics about emotional risk and unfathomable doubt. Musically and lyrically, Shires lets her eccentricities run wild, whether she’s pondering invincibility on the unsettling daydream “Bulletproof” or wondering about death’s “beautiful dream” on “Box Cutters.” Her fiddle ranges fluidly from textural to melodic, as she plucks, bows and strums feverishly. One minute she’s holding her own against Isbell’s abrasive electric guitar on “Devastate”; the next she’s conjuring a full Stax horn section on “Stay.” On Down Fell the Doves, Shires isn’t fiddling to beat the devil. Instead, she draws her bow to keep the darkness at bay.

Cramming a lifetime of musical dares into 70 minutes of music

You can’t make this stuff up. A Nashville jack-of-all-trades during the 1970s, Chance Martin was Johnny Cash’s right-hand man and stage manager for two world tours; a songwriter and musician; a would-be outlaw called the Stoned Ranger; a professional man-about-town; and is currently a co-host of a country show on Sirius XM. In the late 1970s, he and some ex-cop buddies recorded a crazy-ass solo album, which Martin released in a limited run on his own Macho Records. For 30 years, In Search has been a footnote to a footnote, one of approximately infinite albums lost to the dustbin of Music Row history. Thanks to the North Carolina-based label Paradise of Bachelors, however, Martin’s sole full-length is now getting a larger release. Thirty years have done nothing to dull this oddity.

In Search is a mind-bending mélange of mescalin-buzzed country-rock, surrealist-manifesto disco, coke-addled funk, and chicken-fried prog. There are no rules in Chance’s world, so if he wants to indulge some easy-listening strings, make like Barry White visiting a Stuckey’s, or drop “Theme from ‘Peter Gunn’” right in the middle of a song…who’s going to tell him no? It’s not that some ideas don’t work or others miss the mark; it’s that the sheer force of his personality compels every note into a realm where “good” and “bad” may not be applicable. Because it sounds like a man cramming a lifetime of musical dares into 70 minutes of music, In Search can overwhelm a listener, but Martin’s sense of humor — self-deprecating, self-deflating, but somehow self-mythologizing — ensures you won’t turn it off until the last cosmic notes of closer “Drema” have faded.

The legendary group finally releases a full set of original compositions

It’s hard to imagine there’s anything the Preservation Hall Jazz Band hasn’t accomplished in its long life. The group, which was founded at the renowned Preservation Hall in New Orleans, has spent five decades preserving local music traditions while creating a few of their own, thanks to an influx of younger musicians bringing new ideas. As a result, the Jazz Band has become a local institution and one of the hottest acts in the city. Despite the fact that it’s cramped and un-air-conditioned, most nights Preservation Hall turns away more people than it admits.

One thing the Jazz Band has somehow never done is release a full album of original compositions, but their latest, That’s It!, checks that off their to-do list. Nothing here sounds obviously new: These 11 rousing tracks are so steeped in local technique that they could believably pre-date the band. Tinges of gospel (“Dear Lord (Give Me Strength)”), vaudeville (“Rattlin’ Bones”) and speakeasy jazz (“I Think I Love You”) suggest the form’s infinite malleability. The piano ballad “Emmalena’s Lullaby” exudes an easy sentimentalism, as though it had been played at the end of the night at French Quarter pubs for a hundred years.

That’s It! was recorded at the Preservation Hall and produced by Jaffe and My Morning Jacket’s Jim James, which explains its eccentric acoustics as well as its lively pace. In other words, these songs nod to tradition but possess too much energy and idiosyncrasy to succumb to Big Easy nostalgia. Instead, That’s It! makes a highly persuasive case for New Orleans jazz as a modern and still very lively strain of roots music.

Cartwright bought the entire trove of records at a mom-and-pop store in Athens, Ohio, where he has arrived to play a late set at the Nelsonville Music Festival. It turns out there are some treasures in the haul, and he produces a travel turntable and plays an early Conway Twitty single called “I Hope I Think I Wish.” “This is the best part,” Cartwright says, and sings along with Twitty’s aching vocals. Then he spins a few promo spots from obscure flicks from the 1960s: “Do you remember your first time?” “The feds want him alive; the Hells Angels aren’t that particular.” “We have your daughter…” He tosses the last one into his personal pile.

As a record collector, Cartwright has a vast and seemingly endless knowledge of American country, soul, R&B, blues, rockabilly, pop and everything in between. As a musician, he has found ways to integrate these various traditions without sounding beholden to them. With the Oblivians and the Compulsive Gamblers in the 1990s, he developed a potent brand of R&B-inspired punk that breathed new life into the Bluff City’s long and thorny musical history. With the Reigning Sound — his most popular outfit — Cartwright has refined his songwriting to balance raw emotions with raw energy. His output at times seems inhuman: In addition to releasing a handful of solo albums, he has worked with the Reatards and the Detroit Cobras, has produced albums by Mr. Airplane Man and the Ettes, and has formed the Parting Gifts with two-thirds of the Ettes and about half of Nashville.

Cartwright could have spent the afternoon spinning one 45 after another — a haphazard course on rock history for whoever is in the hotel rooms on either side of his. It was only reluctantly that I pulled him away from his stash to get him talking about a few of his own classic cuts.

Oblivians, “I’ll Be Gone”

I heard a rumor that this song is about Jay Reatard.

It’s one of two or three songs where his passing was in my mind. None of the songs are directly about him, but they’re kind of the result of me thinking about his death. Not long after Jay passed, my best friend for years passed away of cancer and then right after that my mother-in-law died. And it really hasn’t stopped since then. You live with blinders on when you’re young, and death and all that shit is just old people stuff. And then all of a sudden you hit this magic age and it’s not later. It’s now. All your friends are dying. And so that’s what this song is about. One thing I was thinking about is how much you miss all these people when they pass. Sometimes I wonder if there is some place after this life, if it’s possible for them to look at us still running in the same circles and doing the same stupid shit and they can see it for how silly it all is. The lyrics are from the perspective of someone who’s not here anymore: I’ll be gone, so I don’t have to watch you do blow. I don’t have to watch you fuck up your life. I’m done with all that.

Is it difficult to sing that song every night as opposed to others songs? Those are some heavy ideas.

They’re heavy ideas, but to me it’s almost easier. The heavier the subject matter, the easier it is to get right where I want to be. I’m a pretty emotional singer because I’m trying to get into a trance state when I’m doing it. If a song can be built in such a way that it makes it easier for me to get there, then that’s good.

Did you write this song with the Oblivians in mind?

I didn’t. I have written songs with people in mind, but it’s not the norm. Sometimes I’ll write a song and think, this will be perfect for this or that. Or, “I wish I had Dolly Parton’s number. I’d send her this.” But I almost never actually go in with an idea for writing for one particular band. I just have an idea for a song and just try to get the song finished.

Greg Cartwright, “Stop and Think It Over”

The Compulsive Gamblers folded in less than a month after recording this song, so I almost never played it with them. What happened was, we recorded that Gamblers record in Detroit, and from there we started to tour. That tour was jinxed. The van broke down every night. We missed show after show trying to repair it. I had sunk all my money into buying the van because nobody else had any money. And then we were in the middle of nowhere, and the other guys were like, “Hey man we’re just going to get a rental and go home.” Okay, I guess I’m going to get this van that was breaking down with all my equipment in it home. The next project to come along was the Reigning Sound, so that was the first band that ever tightened the song up and played it live. Even though it’s a Gamblers song to most people, to me it’s a Reigning Sound song. I’ve played it in almost every incarnation of Reigning Sound. It’s become a staple.

It seems to work so well in so many settings, even a solo acoustic setting like this version.

I find that it works almost anywhere. You could play it several different ways and it still works. Some songs are like that. A really good song shines almost any way you play it. I’m no great judge of what my good songs are and what my bad songs are, but I know that that is a song that people always want to hear. I think it’s probably one of the strongest songs I ever wrote. I don’t know if it’s one of the best. But it has the strongest appeal for the audience than almost any other song in my catalog.

What did you think of Sarah Borges’s cover?

Oh yeah, she does almost a rockabilly thing. I first heard it in a movie theater. I was waiting with my daughter to see a movie and it came on, and my daughter was like, “Hey dad, this is your song! But this isn’t you!” I thought she handled it in a really cool way. And then the Hives did it. I’ve heard a lot of people do it, mainly in a live context. There was a band the Sights from Michigan. They did a 45 of it. And then I did it with Mary Weiss. That was one of the first things she said to me: “I wanna do the record with you guys and I wanna do this song.”

Greg Oblivian & the Tip-Tops, “Bad Man”

This actually predates the Oblivians’ version. This is the original, which I wrote on my son’s toy piano. It wasn’t even a piano. It was a xylophone. I was sitting in the floor with him, and I started playing around with it and I wrote the song while he played. I came up with the lyrics and put it all together very quickly. I don’t know why it occurred to me to try this with the Oblivians, especially when you hear this version. There’s nothing you would really think would work, but it did work out okay. This one has stayed in the set, too. A lot of people have covered it, and people still want to hear it. Any band I play a show with has to know how to play this song. It’s a good one to have in the wings.

Your setlist seems to be comprised of things you don’t necessarily pick out yourself.

It’s really about what the fans want to hear. That’s how things stay in the set. People ask for things. And it changes over time. As I’ve gotten older, my audience has grown. There are young people and old people, people who knew the records and people who are just discovering something I’ve done. They’ve dug out the back catalog and found some song that nobody ever asks for. And they want to hear it. If I get that request a couple of times, I sit down with the band and learn the song. It’s good to listen to the fans, because they know what moves them. And I like to be the person who will go out and play what they want. I always appreciate that when I go see somebody. I went to see Dan Penn and Spooner Oldham one time, and they were in between songs and tuning their guitars, and Dan said, “Is there anything anybody wants to hear?” I yelled, “Tear Joint!” And he goes, “‘Tear Joint’? We haven’t played that one in 30 years, but we’ll try. And they did. At one point he forgot some of the lyrics, but still he tried.

Oblivians, “Viet Nam War Blues”

Sometimes I just get totally obsessed with a certain kind of record, and I try to get as many of them as I can. For a while I was all about Lightnin’ Hopkins. I just love this song. People think San Francisco hippie bands were the only people talking about all this topical stuff like Vietnam. Everybody was talking about it. Nobody’s got dibs on that stuff. When we put that record out, people liked it but were like, “Why is he singing about Vietnam?” There were wars going on that I could have transplanted. I could’ve said “Iraq” or whatever, but I didn’t feel there was anything that needed to be changed.

Reigning Sound, “Goodbye”

I almost never play this song with Reigning Sound, but I do it whenever I do solo shows. And sometimes I’ll get together with friends in Ashville and play sometimes. We just do it for fun — just buddies playing in a bar. And this is one that I always bring to play. It’s a fun melody, and I’ve never written anything with a chord structure that does what this does.

I’ve always associated this song with Memphis, partly because you moved away from that city not too long after this record came out.

It did have to do with that a little bit. The city was a metaphor. It’s really about leaving a part of my life behind. But it became a very physical reality because I did leave. It had become too hard living in the shadow of the Oblivians and the Compulsive Gamblers. At that point the original version of the Reigning Sound was folding. Memphis can be such a petty town. There’s so much gossip and there’s so much backstabbing. It’s a small town with small-town rivalries, and I had made my share of enemies. I had to shrug that shit off and go somewhere else. It was a game changer. I didn’t realize how much it would change my outlook on life.

It seems like a huge jump to go from that rawer Gamblers sound to the slightly more melancholy vibe of Break Up Break Down.

It was a big change. My idea for Reigning Sound was for it to be my all-purpose unit. With Reigning Sound, I could do anything. I could do bombastic and loud and nasty, and I could do pretty and sad. The Gamblers and the Oblivians tried to be live entities. They were touring bands, and that lends itself to being fast and loud because it keeps you working. The problem is getting people in the door to see a band that plays sad songs. Maybe if they came in and sat around for a while they’d probably enjoy it, but they don’t want to take the night off work to go watch it. It’s too heavy, so it took a while for the Reigning Sound to click with people outside of Memphis, mainly because people wanted one thing and I wasn’t prepared to give it to them.

Reigning Sound, “Mind Over Matter”

This is one of my favorite Nolan Strong and the Diablos songs. I just love him. Detroit has always been a second home to me. Nothing is more Detroit than Fortune Records, and nothing says Fortune Records more than Nolan Strong & the Diablos. His voice is so incredible, and the recordings are so terrible. These smaller labels were just people with little record stores and radio shops who just said, “Hey I can just buy a tape recorder and we can make records here in the back room.” They didn’t know anything about mic placement. They weren’t engineers. They just saw an opportunity to make an extra bit of money and they learned as they went along. Some of the charm of the early Diablos stuff is just how raw it is. It doesn’t sound like the Platters. It sounds like the Platters in a gutter. But it has character, which makes it stand out from the pack. And that’s Fortune Records. What’s the other big soul label in Detroit that everybody knows? Motown. I love some Motown stuff, but for the most part the production style gets so samey after a while. Most of it doesn’t do anything for me. I love Smokey Robinson. He’s one of the greatest singers in the world, and pretty much everything on the Going to a Go-Go album is fantastic. But some of his other albums, it’s just song after song with no character. So Fortune is the anti-Motown. Everything sounds bizarre. There’s no set style from record to record.

The Parting Gifts, “Keep Walkin’”

I can’t remember when I wrote this. Sometimes when I write songs, I make a little four-track demo, and when the cassette gets full, I just throw it on the pile. When we were doing this Parting Gifts record, I was going back through some old tapes looking for another song, but I found this one. It’s a good fuck-you song, and I thought it would be a good song to play with the Parting Gifts. Whenever we do Parting Gifts shows, this one always gets played. We’re about to do a new record. In fact, I really should already be working on it, but things got put on hold.

The liners for that album reads like a who’s who of Nashville musicians.

We were making the record in Nashville, where the Ettes live. That was the easiest place for us to work. The great thing about Nashville is that there are players everywhere. One day I said, this song could really use strings, and the engineer was like, I know some girls who play strings. Ten minutes later, these three girls on mopeds show up with a cello and violins. Dan Auerbach was just in town with his wife and daughter, driving around looking at houses. He was thinking about moving there. We called him and said, “Hey come by the studio.” He came by and we said, “Hey play on this record!” It’s a weird record in that no two songs feature the same group of people. It’s three main collaborators and whoever might be there at that time. There’s one song that’s just me. “Don’t Wanna Hurt Me Now.” I got to the studio really early one morning, like 10 o’clock or so. And I thought, “I’m going to go ahead and put the drum track on this.” I finished it really quickly and thought, “I’m going to put the guitar in. And now I’m going to put the bass down. Now the vocal. Okay, we’re done with this thing.”

Reigning Sound, “Drowning”

Did you ever go to Channel 3 Drive in Memphis? That was part of the imagery that was in my head when I wrote the song. That’s what I’m talking about — “under the bridge to Arkansas.” I was always loved that bridge. We would go down there when I was in high school. From the time I knew anybody who had a car, that’s where we went. We’d sit and watch the river, drink beer, screw around, whatever. It was like a lovers’ lane. Anything that you weren’t supposed to be doing, you could do it there in the safety of Channel 3 Drive. Channel 3 is down there, and that’s it really. There’s nothing else down there. The song is about a girl I knew in high school, but it’s not just a straight story of who you were in high school. I’m not sure what it’s about. I know what it started off being about, but then it took some twists and turns that I wasn’t expecting. I’ve had a lot of people tell me, you say in the song “let me tell you what I saw.” But you never really say what you saw. Well, I don’t know what I saw. It’s a mystery.

One of the lines that sticks out to me is, “She’s only 17, but she knows talk is cheap.” That’s a great line, but it comes from a much older point of view, one that can appreciate this kind of no-bullshit youth.

That’s what it’s about. You become so jaded as you get older, and you think you know everything, but kids can sniff out bullshit. They haven’t been trained to believe certain thing or follow certain ideals. They can see things in that immediate moment.

Oblivians, “Live the Life”

I don’t know whatever possessed me to sing like that, because it’s not something that I’m very good at. I wanted to sing really high and let my voice crack. This song has been done a million times by gospel people. Every version is good. But there’s one in particular…I wish I could tell you who it is. The name escapes me. She does a killer version that’s just vocal and piano, and that was what I was trying to imitate.

Do you still sing it that way?

Pretty much. It’s the only way I can sing it. If I try to sing it any other way, then I just think it’s boring. There’s definitely something unhinged about it, and that makes it exciting. When we called up Quintron and asked him to play on the record, he was a little cautious. He said, “I know you want to do gospel songs and stuff, but are you doing it to be corny or funny?” No, no, no. This is all I’ve been listening to for the last four or five months. My head is in it, and this is what I want to do. He was down with that. I started playing the songs I wanted to do, and “Live the Life” was the only one he knew. He had always wanted to do that song. He’s got a couple of versions, and there was one that’s an organ version that’s really strange. I think his organ part may have something to do with that version that he had in mind. But yeah, it’s one of my favorite organ moments on that record.

Vancouver producer goes solo with slow-burn debut

Jay Arner’s self-titled solo debut begins with a low bass groove that sounds like an engine idling, ready to rev “Midnight on South Granville” into high gear. To say the song never bolts away is no complaint, though, as the lyrics recount a night spent catching the bus, missing your stop, getting lost and wandering aimlessly. Set against that chugging bass line, those buzzy synths and that stoner guitar, half-drunk anomie has rarely sounded quite so epic. A Vancouver-based musician who has helmed album by Mount Eerie, Apollo Ghosts and Rose Melberg, Arner recorded these new songs during lonely sessions at his practice space, recording straight to laptop to emphasize a DIY mid-fi sound, and the resulting Jay Arner mixes mopey postpunk instrumentation with power-pop song structures. Even though the unhurried tempos are far too laidback to sell the “power” in the pop, that spacey, narcotized vibe can be deceptive: The music reveals new sonic and lyrical details with each listen, whether it’s the M.C. Escher hook on “Broken Glass” or the world-weary cautions of “Nightclubs,” which finds a tricky balance between wry and romantic.

Summing up his early career, mixing gritty Stax R&B with gospel-rock jamming

A journeyman whose fame never matched his contributions to pop music, Bobby Whitlock made his recording debut at 16, clapping along with Sam & Dave on their hit “I Thank You.” After honing his keyboard chops with Booker T, the native Memphian led Delaney & Bonnie’s touring band, backed George Harrison on All Things Must Pass, and was a founding member of the short-lived blues-rock super-group Derek & the Dominoes. In the early 1970s, he recorded two solo albums with his close friends and famous collaborators, including Harrison and Eric Clapton, and after being out of print for years, Bobby Whitlock and Raw Velvet have been compiled on Where There’s a Will There’s a Way. His nimble piano playing lends a hymn-like gravity to “You Came Along,” but generally the keys are hidden in the mix, possibly to better showcase Clapton’s fluid guitar solos. However, Whitlock’s wild, thundering vocals absolutely dominate these songs, sounding soulful, intense, and even a bit unhinged on “A Day Without Jesus” and a particularly heavy cover of “Hello L.A., Bye Bye Birmingham.” Together, these two albums sum up his early career, mixing gritty Stax R&B with gospel-rock jamming to create a sound that is still potent 40 years later.

File under: Art pop with strong scholarly grounding

For fans of: Laurie Anderson, Kate Bush, P.J. Harvey, David Cronenberg's Wife

From: Oslo, Norway

Jenny Hval’s second solo album — fourth, if you count the two she recorded under the pseudonym Rockettothesky — opens with the Oslo-based artist illuminated by the glow of a computer screen as she watches internet porn. “It’s late and everything turns a white kind of dirty,” she says, setting the scene over a curious cascade of synths.

Forty minutes later, the album ends with Hval envisioning her voice as a second flesh. “My body is the end,” she sings on “The Seer,” as a psychedelic keyboard unspools into infinity.

The ideas on Innocence Is Kinky are bold, but the music itself takes even more risks; Hval combines synth-pop, performance art, drone, garage rock, skewed folk, spoken word and wordless ragas into a constantly mutating sonic palette. It’s the combination of music and concept that drives Hval, an academic and critic who wrote her master’s thesis on Kate Bush, penned a novel called Perlebryggeriet (The Pearl House), and designs sound installations such as the recent “A Continuous Echo of Splitting Hymens.”

Innocence Is Kinky grew out of Hval’s installations, yet the songs took on a life of their own as she played festivals and clubs around Scandinavia and Europe, where a new aggression snuck into her performances. By the time she recorded the album with producer John Parish (P.J. Harvey, Sparklehorse, Grandaddy), the songs had morphed into all new arrangements that allowed Hval to bend her dexterous voice into all new shapes and sounds.

As she prepared for tour, Hval spoke with eMusic’s Stephen M. Deusner about film close-ups, European nationalism, the male gaze and the challenge of writing pure sound.

On working with John Parish:

A friend of mine from Australia had almost worked with him, and she was saying how nice he was, so I decided to contact him — but I’m very shy, so I had to get someone else to do it. He was very nice and incredibly balanced and very open, and he was not in any way judgmental about the music, which allowed me to be more spontaneous. He was just this wide-open ear, and was brave with the music. Plus, he threw himself into playing with my band as a band member, so it was very much a creative collaboration. It was very relaxed and we had a lot of fun. It was very positive and almost like a cheerful process, and there’s actually a lot of humor on the album. I have this tendency to get stuck in this weird way of thinking, where I find that something must be serious to be experimental. How dumb. When I got home from recording, John sent me one of Captain Beefheart’s albums — Doc at the Radar Station — and I’ve been listening a lot to that and learning a lot from that.

On writing and singing in both English and Norwegian:

Obviously, my Norwegian is superior to my English. I only started writing in English when I moved to Australia. But sometimes I feel like I’m a grown up in Norwegian but I’m a teenager in English. I’ve grown up listening to pop music with English lyrics and almost nothing with Norwegian lyrics, so English was always the language to be sung and Norwegian was the language in which teachers told you what to do. I remember listening to a lot of the Velvet Underground, and I didn’t understand any of the drug references. That came later. When you listened to pop music, you didn’t understand a single word for years, so you just invented your own meaning. It’s very far away from what the actual meaning is, but you have this amazing process of just listening to language and not even thinking that it is language. It’s this quality of seeing straight through the words and into the sound. English was always freer, and I still tap into that freedom when I write. But recently I’ve written a couple of new songs where I sing in both English and Norwegian. For me, this is just crazy. I have no voice in Norwegian, so I find myself sounding like I’m doing traditional Indian singing. So I’m still trying to learn how to sing in Norwegian. It’s very new. But I’m of two minds about using Norwegian, because it’s very hip at the moment to return to your own language and to me I can’t help but think of what’s going on in Europe with this new right-wing nationalist movement. I find it very frightening.

On accidentally writing more aggressive songs:

My previous album was much more of a quiet, inward-looking album, and I got fed up with “inward-looking.” When I played live sets that were much more quiet, I got really sick of my own songs very quickly and had to stop playing them. I could never go back to them, ever. But I think it’s changed a lot for me, I think just from doing a lot of improvisation. I just played a lot, and songs like “I Called” are songs that I would have gotten rid of before. I played that song as an improvisation and thought, “What is this about?” It was like writing a blog. Quite a lot of songs were like that, and I guess I was just trying to get my head around this new aggression — singing louder and playing louder. So I decided to keep that song instead of moving on to more refined songs. The aggression was there at that moment, and I found it to be interesting as an expression.

On not trusting her instincts:

I’m not sure that I always trust my songs. I just play them anyway. I was talking with someone about this last night. We were discussing if we were thick. I said to her, I don’t think I have thick skin, but there’s this stupidity in me. Even if I’m affected by everything, I just don’t know how I can react to it. I’m almost like a grunge artist — I am full of self-hatred and I don’t trust what I do at all. Yet I have no problem doing it. But I think that’s why I change the way I play live. I have a moment of trusting a song, and then I go, “No! I have to change it!”

On looking outward to look inward:

Innocence Is Kinky is an outward-looking album, but what it’s looking at is a world that is very much a mirror world. It’s a world of visuals that are just telling you to look at yourself, to identify with everything. This has been my experience watching a lot of films over the years, as a female spectator, and seeing the objectification of the body in all different kinds of genres. As a young girl, you’re asked to identify with being an object or identify with being looked at. It can be painful to look at things and realize that everything is about looking back at yourself. Visual culture is just this mirror. There’s nothing else. There’s nothing behind it. It reminds me a little bit of the dangers of capitalism, which lays everything on the individual so that no one is to blame. Everything is your own fault. If you didn’t make it, it’s your fault. There’s no system.

On being ready for her close-up, Mr. DeMille:

I watch a lot of everything. I have no boundaries. There is nothing I do not watch. My interest is so nerdy that I don’t care so much about gender, and I’ve always been so obsessed with film and also sounds and voices on film. There are no voices in Joan of Arc, but you have that face, which is so close. It’s very much like pop music where you always have the voice with the microphone very close, so you have this ability to be huge. This is something I find very interesting on stage, where I can whisper and it will be enlarged It’s like a magnifying glass for the voice.

On dividing her time as a musician, novelist, critic, and essayist:

I see things as very connected, so it’s hard for me to separate between writing an essay and writing a song. Sometimes an essay becomes a song, which doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t be a song or that it could only be an essay. On the other hand, I find it very hard to write music criticism. The more I write, the harder it gets and the more I realize I’m just saying the same thing over and over. As for fiction, I’ve written one novel and a book that I would just call a book because it’s trying to be much closer to the music and the way I work with sound and voices. It was an attempt for me to get closer to the speaking voice and the sounds I hear in language in my head when I write, which was great. But writing a novel is very distancing from that directness that I’m very fond of in my songwriting, and there’s so much more writing of words obviously than in a song. The music is gone and then you have all these descriptions in a novel that replace sound. Where is he? Which way is he looking? What’s the color of this? Rather than just the [sings] daaaaaah of sound. And to me the daaaaaah is much more interesting. So yeah, I’m trying to write more like sound.

The trio goes from side project to supergroup

In his 2012 memoir Waging Heavy Peace, Neil Young gave a rave review to the Pistol Annies, observing that the Nashville trio was “writing their asses off.” It was an unexpected shout-out, to which the women responded via tweet that they nearly peed their pants with excitement. Such praise was warranted. On their 2011 debut, the group — which consists of Miranda Lambert, Ashley Monroe and Angaleena Presley delivered a batch of sharply observed country tunes that ranged from hilarious to heartbreaking and that appealed even to listeners who profess to love everything but country.

Despite that success, it’s still a hard-knock life for these Annies, who smartly chronicle the joys and trials of being a woman in the 2010s. On “Being Pretty Ain’t Pretty,” they spend a lot of time and money applying make-up and even more time and money taking it off, but they never play it off as a joke. Instead, they sympathize with the woman in the mirror and their close harmonies invest the song with a deep melancholy. Songs like “Trading One Heartbreak for Another” and “Dear Sobriety” are quietly devastating, but the Annies’ sass and smarts remain. First single “Hush Hush,” a kissin’ cousin to Robert Earl Keen’s “Merry Christmas from the Family,” is a devious ode to the open secrets and hidden conflicts that bind a family, even if it sends Monroe out behind the barn to spark one up. The Pistol Annies may have started as a side project for these solo artists, but on Annie Up, they prove themselves as a supergroup.

A Dixie Chick returns, scarred but smarter

Still scarred from the backlash she endured for dissing George Bush 10 years ago, Natalie Maines has jettisoned any trace of the twang that survived the Dixie Chicks’ last album, Taking the Long Way, and has made her first real rock ‘n’ roll record. Mother is not merely a shift in musical direction or a crossover attempt; instead, it’s the sound of a woman fighting defiantly to redefine herself with a harder, steelier sound. Fortunately, Maines’s commanding voice remains intact. She nimbly navigates the slow build from soft melody to full gospel finale on “Free Life,” while “Trained” binds a torrid sex metaphor to a rowdy blues-rock groove courtesy of co-producer Ben Harper. Her cover of “Lover Your Should Have come Over” may be too faithful to Jeff Buckley’s original to transcend karaoke, but Maines picks up some intriguing vocal tricks — especially a new way to treat vowels — and applies them throughout Mother. Best of all is the Jayhawks’ “I’d Run Away,” which shows the Dixie Chick at her most unguarded. Despite the tough rock exterior she constructs, the song reveals a bruised self-doubt that haunts the album. Maines might love to run away, but she knows she has to stay and keep fighting.

A travelogue through America and American music

Patty Griffin’s seventh album — and her first collection of new songs in six years — opens with “Go Wherever You Wanna Go,” a delicate rural blues number that bristles with slide guitar and promises of travel and escape. That song establishes American Kid as a meditation on wanderlust of all kinds — emotional, physical and musical — and it may be Griffin’s most adventurous and diverse effort yet. Rather than record again in Austin or Nashville, Griffin decamped to Memphis, where she absorbed the Bluff City’s deep, rich history and recruited Luther and Cody Dickinson of the North Mississippi All-Stars as her backing band. Fortunately, this is no kneejerk approximation of local blues or soul. No musical tourist, Griffin is not interested in re-creating that Sun or Stax sound; instead, she hits the crossroads and goes in all directions at once.

The songs on American Kid represent points on a map. Griffin pleads for her life on “Don’t Let Me Die in Florida,” whose urgency is sharpened by Luther Dickinson’s gritty guitar work, while “Ohio” (inspired by the Underground Railroad) establishes a rustic folk drone that’s simultaneously lovely and unsettling. Even on the more direct tracks, like the lusty beerhall sing-along “Get Ready Marie” or her tender cover of Lefty Frizzell’s “Mom and Dad’s Waltz,” her exquisite twang gives life to a range of characters: prodigal sons, itinerant laborers, deserting soldiers, horny bridegrooms. Griffin loses herself not only in American musical traditions but also in American history, as though to escape some horrors of the present. As a result, American Kid sounds like her own version of the Great American Novel, expansive in narrative scope and generous in its earthy humanity.

The sound of a band girding for a hard fight

On, 2010′s Personal Life, Portland trio the Thermals jettisoned the political angst that motivated their early material in favor of a more autobiographical subject matter. Frontman Hutch Harris sang about matters of the heart rather than matters of state, as if to suggest that each provoked the same outrage. Taking one step further, their follow-up couches the personal within the political: Desperate Ground, their first album for Saddle Creek and their sixth overall, is among their most rousing and most animated. This is the sound of a band girding for a hard fight: “The sword at my side will allow me to be the last thing my enemies see,” sings Harris on the punk-triumphal standout “The Sword at My Side.”

The Thermals have strategized and streamlined their attack, pummeling through these songs as a three-person rhythm section: Harris playing furious rhythm guitar, Kathy Foster adding dexterous melodies on bass, and drummer Westin Glass pounding away like they’ll face the firing squad if any song exceeds three-and-a-half-minute mark. That strategy can be repetitive across 10 tracks, but it never becomes tedious, thanks to the jittery hooks and blunt impact of “Faces Stay with Me” and “I Go Alone.” The Thermals sound reinvigorated, but rather than smite their enemies, they rally to remind themselves why they keep waging their own personal battle of the band.

File under: '70s country folk with hints of rustic psychedelia and spiritual malaise

For fans of: Bonnie "Prince" Billy, Iron & Wine, The Black Twig Pickers

From: North Carolina via California

Personae: Primarily Michael Taylor (guitar, mandolin, voice), but occasionally Scott Hirsch (bass, guitar) and Terry Lonergan (drums)

It feels odd to ask “Who is…?” of a guy who has been making music for nearly 20 years, but veteran Michael Taylor is just now finding his largest audience with Hiss Golden Messenger. It’s actually his third band, following the short-lived punk group Ex-Ignota and the longer-lived San Francisco alt-country act The Court & Spark. When the latter broke up in 2007 — after four albums and nearly a decade of near-constant touring — Taylor settled down in Durham, North Carolina, where he started a family, pursued a degree in folklore, and made music more as a hobby than as a priority.

Over several albums — a few self-released, a few more via North Carolina indie label Paradise of Bachelors — Hiss Golden Messenger has alternated between an austere solo acoustic project for Taylor and a full band featuring Scott Hirsh on guitar and Terry Lonergan on drums. For Haw, the fourth and arguably best release under the HGM moniker, they added members of Lambchop, Megafaun and the Black Twig Pickers to the line-up.

Whether alone or with friends, however, the primary elements of Hiss Golden Messenger remain constant: Taylor’s voice, which sounds both genial and mysterious, and his lyrics, which examine thorny issues of faith, fidelity, and family. Stephen M. Deusner caught up with Taylor to discuss North Carolina, the South, and that strange little word “haw.”

On growing up in a musical family:

My father is a musician. When he was growing up during the early to mid ’60s, the folk revival was a really big part of what was going on in the country. He went to high school with Steve Martin, who, besides being a comedian, is a huge fan of bluegrass. The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band and Jackson Browne also went to that school. So he had an interest folk music, and that was how I heard a lot of the music that ended up being the points of entry into traditional folk and country. It’s not that far from the Byrds to Merle Haggard to Doc Watson to The Anthology of American Folk Music.

On moving to North Carolina:

I draw a lot of inspiration from Southern music. It’s one of the big reasons why we ended up here. I felt like I needed to live in the South to understand the music that I love so well. I think about region as very specific places, like there was a time when people could hear a song and they could tell what county is was from. I don’t think my music works the same way, but there’s certainly a sense of place in Hiss Golden Messenger records. I feel very connected to this place. This is my home. We bought a house here. Our son was born here. Our daughter will be born in July and she’ll be a North Carolina native. I’m proud to live here and make music here.

On being a non-Southerner playing Southern music:

I would never refer to myself as a Southerner. That is reserved for people who are born and raised here. I do have a deep appreciation for what the South has given to American culture. I’m certainly using Southern instrumentation and song forms in my music, but I’m not discussing Southern issues or concerns as much as I’m talking about what is going on in my heart and in my head.

On the word “Haw”:

I think of this record as a very dark record, certainly the darkest that I’ve made. And I thought there was something a little comical about calling it Haw, if you think of haw as laughter. It’s the name of a river in this region that I live very close to. There’s Hee Haw, too, which was a great show. It perpetuated a lot of stereotypes that people certainly disagreed with, but on the other hand, it presented a lot of incredible music. It’s a complicated show.

On Hiss Golden Messenger as a solo vs. band project:

I don’t write with a band. I write by myself. There are a lot of parts of Hiss Golden Messenger that are very solitary. When I started Hiss Golden Messenger in earnest, I was pretty isolated out here and I was concerned with writing these internal narratives and puzzling out personal issues I was dealing with. So Hiss Golden Messenger is me and whoever is playing me. If I’m playing with a band, then Scott Hirsch is going to be there. He recorded Haw, he mixed it, he played bass and a bunch of other stuff on there. And Terry Lonergan is really crucial to the full band records we make.

On confronting spiritual issues in song:

I was talking to someone about this last weekend and was flipping through some notebooks. I always have multiple notebooks with me, and as I was trying to sum up the record with a concise thesis, I flipped to a page that read, “I will not pray in fear.” This record is me trying to understand my inner life, my spiritual place in the world. Is faith rooted in fear or is it rooted in peace? I have a lot of questions, but I don’t have any answers to them. It can be frustrating. And I’m not convinced that my ideas of faith and spirituality are getting any clearer they older I get. In fact, I think they’re getting hazier. Let me say, I’m not a churchgoing person. I think the Bible is a great book and also incredibly flawed. I don’t know what my idea of God is. That’s what these records are about.

On re-recording old songs for new albums:

I’ve recorded a bunch of my songs a couple of times. [Haw features a new version of "The Serpent Is Kind (Compared to Man)," which originally appeared on 2010's Bad Debt.] There’s a long history in traditional music of people re-recording songs, but it’s not something that happens so much in the independent music world. I don’t like the idea of a recording of a song being static. These things should live. Certainly the ideas being presented in these songs are worth revisiting over and over again, because a lot of times the words just come through me and I don’t even fully understand them. So it’s good to go back and sing them again, although some of them can be very painful to record and talk to people about. But I think it’s a good pain.

On being part of North Carolina’s music scene:

People have been very kind and welcoming to me here, although I feel like I’m still sort of an outlier — for purely logistical reasons, though. For a multitude of reasons, I’m not out and about very much. But there is a brotherhood — or sisterhood — of musicians in this region that feels very special and very different from other places I’ve lived. For how small of a place it is, there’s a very high ratio of really incredible bands: Megafaun, Mount Moriah, Mountain Goats, Spider Bags, It’s endless. I’m very close with Phil and Brad Cook [of Megafaun]. Phil played on most of Haw. The entire cultural scene here is just really vibrant, from food to writing to music to visual art. It’s a beautiful place to be. To put it this way, my wife and I just bought a house, and I hired Ash Bowie of Polvo to do the electrical work.

Rambunctious alt-country that exorcises its romantic ghosts

Austin alt-country outfit Numbers And Letters open their full-length debut with a brash declaration: “The fire’s been lit,” sings frontwoman Katie Hasty on “Ghost.” “I hope you still love this house, ’cause I just burned it down.” She’d rather torch the place than share it with ghosts who lurk but don’t pay rent. It’s a memorable introduction to an album littered with memories of doomed loves and populated by lovers pushed to emotional extremes. Hasty’s lyrics can be a little overwrought, especially on the quiet “Dark Adam,” but they’re never timid. Plus, she sings them in a voice that’s eloquently textured and expressive, barely suppressing a southern accent that subtly bends her notes and syllables. On “If You Say the Words,” Hasty (a music critic for Hitfix) sounds both wounded and determined as she hits the high notes and delivers weary observations about “love wasted on me.” With each song, the band introduces some new idea or sound that expands the album’s palette: the sympathetic clarinet accompaniment on “Stacks and Stacks,” the violent punctuation of guitars on “Ghost,” the Morricone moodiness of “Wading.” Guns Under Water is all over the places, yet Numbers And Letters never sounds scattered or unfocused, thanks largely to the band’s charismatic frontwoman. She brings the house down.

A fine introduction to an engaging talent in country music

Ashley Monroe is best known as Hippie Annie, one fringe-dressed third of the country supergroup the Pistol Annies. Even before she proved she could hold her own against bandmates Miranda Lambert and Angeleena Presley, which is certainly no small feat, the Knoxville-born Monroe had a short, strange career. Her label may have fumbled the release of her excellent 2007 debut, Satisfied, but she proved an adept networker as well as collaborator who has since worked with Trent Dabbs, Brendan Benson, Jack White and…uh, Train?

Thanks to the success of the Pistol Annies, Monroe finally has a new label and a new sophomore album, Like a Rose, co-produced by Vince Gill. Much like her debut, it makes a fine introduction to an engaging talent in country music. Faster tunes like “Monroe Suede” and “Weed Instead of Roses” reveal a rambunctious energy and a lively humor, and she holds her own against Blake Shelton on “You Ain’t Dolly (And You Ain’t Porter),” a lively duet about karaoke singers lowering their romantic standards. The album’s best moments, however, are the wounded ballads like “You Got Me” and “She’s Driving Me Out of Your Mind,” where Monroe’s careful vocals actually do recall Dolly Parton at her most melancholy. “Used” in particular sounds both bruised and bold. Like the song’s narrator, Monroe may not have had the easiest time in Nashville, but those setbacks have obviously made her stronger.

Emerging as a confident, distinctive pop-country artist

Given her avowed love of old Hollywood glamour (just check out that album cover), the title of Caitlin Rose’s sophomore full-length likely refers to the 1937 backlot comedy The Stand-In, about a love triangle between the title character, a hapless number cruncher and a hopeless film producer. While Rose does write about similar romantic confusions, the film reference nevertheless comes across as false modesty: On these dozen songs, she emerges as a confident, distinctive pop-country artist with a biting lyrical style and a smart way with a hook. Perhaps A Star Is Born sounded too cocky?

Like any good actress, Rose has impressive range. The Stand-In has roots in classic country, displaying the poise of Tammy Wynette on “Everywhere I Go” and the assertiveness of Loretta Lynn on “Waitin’.” Standout “Golden Boy” casts her as a countrypolitan chanteuse against a widescreen arrangement that recalls Owen Bradley, and she turns that chorus into a gently devastating plea: “Golden boy, don’t go away/ I won’t ask you what you’re here for/ If you stay.” Occasionally she holds her twang in check, but for the most part her vocals are expressive, building from the conspiratorial whisper of “When I’m Gone” to the full-throated belt of “Only a Clown.”

Rarely reverent to one style or genre, The Stand-In mixes country with classic rock, radio pop, and even speakeasy jazz on closer “Old Numbers.” The rollicking Hank- and Tennessee Williams-inspired “Menagerie” and first single “Only a Clown” both hinge on Byrds-style guitar riffs that suggest an affinity for West Coast nuggets, and the Las Vegas-set “Pink Champagne” is debauched country folk, a sad-eyed and slightly sloshed reimagining of Gram Parsons’s “Sin City.” No matter how blue she sounds, there’s always a lively hint of humor even in her despair — a distinguishing trait that suggests she may be ready for her close-up.

Kid Face is arguably Crain’s most sophisticated album to date, and certainly her most revealing. Featuring spare arrangements that highlight her voice and words, it’s a collection of conversations with herself, songs full of accusations and ruminations on past transgressions and present regrets. Her lyrics are evocative yet evasive, often obscuring as much as they reveal; her vocals bend words into unexpected shapes and sounds, as though each syllable holds endless musical possibilities. In some respect, perhaps her breakneck recording process allows Crain to get her ideas and emotions down on tape while they’re at their rawest and their most exposed.

As she prepares to hit the road to tour behind Kid Face, Crain spoke with eMusic’s Stephen Deusner about being mistaken for a teenager, working with Vanderslice, talking to herself, and writing a song about burying something mysterious behind the old Conoco sign on Anderson Road.

Is there a story behind the album title? Why did that phrase resonate with you?

On a frequent basis most people think I am a teenager, probably because I’m short and I’ve got a round face and I’m generally not that put-together in my appearance. So I get this sneak peek into how people would treat me when they think I’m 17 or 18, and whenever they do find out how old I am, they treat me in a different way. It’s not that they’re treating me bad, but there’s a distinct difference in the way people talk to me before they know how old I am. It’s given me a very interesting second look into people, which is interesting for a songwriter who observes society and writes about it. I thought it was a really good descriptive moniker for myself. I did not give it to myself. My bass player Penny [Hill] and I were joking around one day and giving each other rapper names, and that was what she bestowed upon me. I just got attached to it. As for the song “Kid Face,” it was the first song that I started for the album, but it actually took me the longest. It took me until I was completely done with the whole album to finish the song. I thought it was a good beginning and end point to everything that I had written in between.

What made that song so difficult to write?

Usually I have a very focused subject for a song, but “Kid Face” was all over the place. I had been thinking about a trip I had taken to Mexico a couple of years ago, and I was constantly noticing the differences between the country I was in and the country I was from. At the same time, I was thinking about these differences between the age I look, the age I am and the age I feel. It was a whole lot of thoughts that didn’t have a whole lot to do with each other. I took me a long time to hammer out all those ideas into something that would actually make sense for someone to listen to. It had to seem like it was a cohesive thought process even though there were a lot of thoughts going on.

Compared to your last album, You (Understood), which you’ve described as being about very specific moments with very specific people, Kid Face sounds like it’s more about you.

This is the first album that I’ve written that is completely autobiographical. There’s no fiction dust sprinkled on any of the songs, and that’s something that has taken me a while to get to. Before I was writing songs, I was a fiction writer. I was writing short stories and things like that. I’ve always erred on the side of fiction, because I was a very fanciful kid. I was not super happy with how normal my life was. I always used fiction to cover that up. It’s just taken me getting older and becoming more comfortable with myself to get to the point where I feel like my own life is worth attaching poetics to and turning into songs. I don’t think I wasn’t really doing it on purpose, but the first couple of songs I wrote for the album were autobiographical and very personal, and I got really excited about them, because I hadn’t really been able to access that. It was exciting, like I had entered a new area as a songwriter. That became my focus for the album — staying in that area and making something that would be completely autobiographical.

Several of these new songs sound like conversations with yourself, almost like you’re addressing them to some future version of you.

You’re right. I’m one of those people who talks to myself a lot, to the point of being the crazy person on the bench talking to themselves. That is something that has developed over the past couple of years. I think it might have a lot to do with traveling alone more than I ever have. I used to always travel with a band, but I’ve been doing a lot more solo stuff and traveling alone, so you get to be a little in your own headspace. And you do end up talking to yourself a lot and working things out in your head — figuring out what you believe about certain things and hammering out different ideas. So yeah, I think the shape the songs ended up taking was these solitary conversations with myself. They say you don’t really know what you believe until you’ve said it out loud, and you don’t really know how you feel about what you believe until you’ve said it out loud. I always feel like if you say it out loud, it makes it more comprehensible. So I end up doing that a lot.

Songs like “Ax” and “Taught to Lie” almost sound like you’re trying to persuade yourself of something, or maybe hold yourself accountable.

When you’re traveling to a different town every day for a number of years, when you’re around the same people all the time, you don’t have the basic accountability or the rules that you abide by with the rest of the world. You can choose to take that and use it as a get-out-of-jail-free card, like I did for a while. I did a real disservice to the people around me. I got away with a lot of things, and acted in ways that I’m not proud of. So after a while, you have to create some moral accountability for yourself. You have to create some rules of integrity. If nobody else is around to do it for you — if you don’t have a community to do that — you have to become that community for yourself. And I feel like that’s what “Taught to Lie” is about. It’s about me wanting to be that accountability for myself through singing that song. “Ax” is in that vein as well. It’s really just trying to find out my own way to become a decent human being.

Does that make performing these new songs more intense or emotional for you?

I can’t speak too much to that because I haven’t performed a lot of them too much yet. But there are songs that I have written in the past that have been very personal — there was a song off my album Songs in the Night called “The Dam Song” — that I can sing night after night for years, and it’s still a very affecting experience, just like the first time. So I’m going to go out on a limb and say that with a lot of these songs, I think I’m going to be realizing new things every time I sing them. The meanings are going to change. It’ll be like looking back on an old diary.

Did that change the way you recorded these songs?

I think I was pretty comfortable with these songs. I didn’t feel like I had to cover anything up or everything had to sound perfect or there had to be a cool element to everything. So that helped. Whenever you can get yourself out of that mindset and just focus on making a good record, it creates a mood that I can’t quite explain. Sometimes you can hear the tensions and attitudes on a record, but everything was easygoing and comfortable during the recording process. I think the mood of the album picks up on that.

Did John Vanderslice help set that tone in the studio? How did you end up working with him?

I had sent him a couple of demos and asked him to help with a 7-inch single I did last year. I wanted to record at Chinese Telephone. We really clicked, and at one point I just said, “You’re producing my next record.” He’s a musician in his own right, and I think that’s what makes him such a good producer. He knows how protective and selfish musicians can be with their work, such that by the time you get into the studio and are ready to record a song, you’ve spent so much time with it and you think you know exactly how you want it to sound. John has a good way of working you out of that headspace without making you feel like you’re compromising your vision. He’s really good at making you focus on the album as a whole and not make each song sound so labored over. Because of that, this album has ended up sounding…it’s a very easy album. We recorded it in a week, and I feel like it’s a very natural and easy-sounding album.

That sound seems to reinforce one of the album’s major themes: this compulsion to travel, to always be on the move. It’s most obvious on “Somewhere All the Time,” but seems to inform every song.

I’m asked a lot if traveling so much and being away from home is hard, and I think for many musicians it is. A lot of bands love to write and record, and traveling is the part they have to accept as part of the whole thing. They have to tour. For me, it’s not like that. I’m obsessed with moving around and traveling. It’s just as much an important to me as writing and recording. I’m not sure why that is. It’s just my element. I do think it’s helped me to appreciate where I am from a little more. It gives me a better bird’s-eye view of what’s going on here. I can write my state and my people a little better when I do get back here, because I’ve been so removed from it for a while. It’s like an anthropologist’s point of view. It’s a lot easier to write about things that you aren’t in the middle of all the time. It’s easier to see patterns of human interaction when you are looking at it from the outside.

There’s one place in particular that plays a crucial role on the album — the old Conoco sign on Anderson Road. Did you really bury something there, as you describe on “Taught to Lie”?

Ha. There used to be a box, but I have since moved it. The point of it being there was for someone to find it, and then I didn’t want them to find it anymore. So I moved it.

I imagine there will be some fans digging around that area trying to find it.

Anderson Road is a long-ass road, so it would take anybody a long time to figure out where I was talking about.

Kristofferson certainly has a lot to look back on. Born in Texas midway through the Great Depression, he was a football star in college, a Rhodes Scholar, an Army helicopter pilot and a janitor at Columbia Studios in Nashville. When the industry finally took note of the mop-pusher’s talents, he penned hits for Johnny Cash, Ray Price, Sammi Smith and — perhaps most famously — Janis Joplin. As an actor, he worked with some of the greatest filmmakers of the ’70s, including Peckinpah, Scorsese and Friedkin. He brings all those experiences to bear on Feeling Mortal, but Kristofferson, speaking from his home in California, said he was most grateful for very different things: his large family, his long marriage (“she does all the work and I sit around watching television,” he chuckles), and a good song every now and then.

This album sounds like a thematic extension of the last two, which also deal with old age and mortality. Did you think of them as being connected?

Actually, no. I usually I think every album that I’ve done has been autobiographical, like a scrapbook — what I’m going through at the time. And I guess that’s probably why these seem similar, because I’m just growing older. I don’t feel bad about it, but it’s the way things look now.

So you couldn’t have written this album at any other point in your life.

Probably. Well, I know I never would have written a couple of the songs, like “Feeling Mortal.” I wouldn’t have written that one. There are a few in there that are older from back when I was first attracted to writing country songs. “My Heart Was the Last One to Know.” I can’t even think of which ones I got on there now…”Stairway to the Bottom.”

What made you gravitate toward “My Heart Was the Last to Know” for this album?

I really don’t know. I did about 20 songs with Don and the musicians, and then we selected half of them. I thought it was just a great song and wanted to include it. This is a reflective time of my life, so I’m more apt to be looking back at some of the old songs. Some of them almost feel like new songs to me because I haven’t thought of them in a long time.

The tone of the album is definitely reflective, but it’s also very contented. Especially the title track, which could have been very morbid but actually sounds very thankful.

I’m glad you feel that way, because that’s the way I feel. I feel gratitude. I don’t feel any anxiety about being at this end of the road, you know. I feel very blessed to have all these experiences behind me and to be living with family that I love. Lisa and I are very happy. She does all the work and I watch television.

There are some very affecting tributes to people like “Mama Stewart” and “Ramblin’ Jack.” How did those two people end up on the album?

Mama Stewart was Rita Coolidge’s grandmother, and she was pretty remarkable. I felt like I had a good description of her, especially her attitude toward her blindness and the fact that she got her site back after she was in her ’90s. And just like it says in the song, she didn’t seem at all surprised. God was doing her right. What was the other song?

“Ramblin’ Jack.”

That song reminds me of when I wrote “The Pilgrim.” A lot of people said it seemed like I was writing about Jack, but I was writing about myself, you know. But I was probably writing about what I recognized in Jack, and what I was saying in “The Pilgrim” applied to a whole bunch of us — the people I respected who were doing the same thing I was, which was gathering songs. More than anything else that was what was important. It didn’t matter whether you were rich or successful or whatever. The songs existed by themselves and serious songwriters who I related to — who I identified myself through — felt the same way.

“Feeling Mortal” seems to be very concerned with the comforts and thrills of music. You sing about that on “Bread for the Body” and “You Don’t Tell Me What to Do.”

Like I said, I’ve always written about what I was going through at the time. That’s why looking back on my albums is like looking back over a scrapbook of my life. At my age, I reflect more on how lucky I am that I got to make this my life — to be creative, to be making pieces of art that work and that other people can identify with. Ever since I put my life in that direction, I’ve never regretted it. I’ve never ever thought I’d made a wrong move, and it just keeps getting better. I got eight kids who love each other and laugh all the time. I’ve been married for 30 years and it gets better every day. I feel very fortunate that this is my life.

There have certainly been some changes in your voice over the years. It sounds a bit lower, for one thing. Has that changed how you write songs?

I don’t know anything about that. I’ve never had a very approachable voice. I know when I first went to Nashville, they wouldn’t even let me sing my own demos. But people tolerate it now. And I know at least I ain’t a great vocalist. People I like to listen to, like Hank Williams and Ray Charles, they’re great voices. Merle Haggard. Willie Nelson. I just feel grateful that I’m able to work with those people and we respect each other. I know the very first album that I made, I felt it was overproduced. I wasn’t used to recording and I was just working with people who recorded that way in Nashville. But I was just grateful to be able to make a record, and I do appreciate that since I’ve been working with Don anyway, it’s been more aimed at being compatible with my way of singing. I’ll never be a great vocalist, but I can interpret my own songs.

How does it feel to live with some of these songs for so much of your life? Do songs like “Sunday Morning Coming Down” or “For the Good Times” take on new significance over time?

For some reason, when I’m performing the songs, luckily I go into them and I feel the same as I did when I wrote them. “Bobby McGee” always feels the same to me. I feel the same mixture of sadness and gratitude. It’s I think that’s one of the beauties of songs for me, is that you feel them. I don’t know if that’s by virtue of the music or the words or a combination of both. But you experience what you were experiencing when you were writing them back then. Even “Help Me Make It through the Night,” I can feel just like I did when I wrote that.

So they’re almost like time machines.

Yes. You put your finger on it right there. It is a time machine. You go back in time. I’m not still getting up and having a beer for breakfast on a Sunday morning, but I can go back there every time I sing the song. But that’s what songs should do for you. They should affect you spiritually, physically and emotionally

You’ve always been quick to recognize and support other songwriters, most famously John Prine. Are there any current songwriters that have impressed you lately?

There are songwriters, and I’m afraid that I can’t say who they are. One thing that has happened to my brain as I’ve gotten older is that my memory has gotten so bad that I can’t remember names at all. I’ve been told it’s a result of football and boxing. So far it hasn’t upset me any, though. I’m thinking of about three different writers and I can’t begin to tell you their names. I don’t listen to the radio at all, and I really don’t listen to much music anymore either. I haven’t really listened to a lot of music ever since I started working on the road singing my own songs, which usually fill up my head. But I am glad I ran into people like John Prine. I’m going to see him pretty soon. He’s coming out to where I live in Maui and we’re going to sing a couple of songs together. Or we just did. [Laughs.] I’m sorry. Oh boy. Well, there you go.

Representing nearly 50 years of wide-ranging country music

Originally recorded for the notoriously corny hillbilly sketch comedy series Hee Haw, the covers on the new Buck Owens comp Honky Tonk Man represent nearly 50 years of country music, from Jimmie Rodgers’s 1928 hit “In the Jailhouse Now” through “Rednecks, White Socks and Blue Ribbon Hit,” a hit for Johnny Russell in 1973. Owens pioneered the Bakersfield Sound, which amplified the primarily acoustic genre of country music, and Honky Tonk Man shows just how wide ranging that sound was, how easily it could adapt to various other strains of country music. It helps that the Buckaroos (who pre-recorded their tracks and mimed playing along with Owens on Hee Haw) were one of the tightest country bands of their time, lending a jumpy momentum to Stonewall Jackson’s “I Washed My Hands in Muddy Water” and a surprising rhythmic sophistication to Charley Pride’s “Is Anybody Goin’ to San Antone.” Owens recorded his vocals as mere reference tracks for the musicians and mixers, but he doesn’t hold back, attacking these songs with the same interpretive sensitivity he brought to his proper recordings. Ultimately, Honky Tonk Man is the rare archival collection that serves as an apt introduction to Owens and his brand of electrified country music.

One country music's most inventive, influential and unsung guitar players

Throughout the 1960s and ’70s, Don Rich played lead guitar in Buck Owens’s backing band the Buckaroos, laying down licks on huge hits like “Tiger by the Tail” (which he co-wrote) and “Act Naturally.” His rich tone and impeccable timing helped define the Bakersfield sound, which introduced electric guitar to the largely acoustic genre. In the early ’70s, Rich recorded an album of George Jones covers, with Owens producing in his new Bakersfield studio. For reasons that we’ll never know, however, the album was shelved; Rich died in a motorcycle accident in 1974, and Don Rich Sings George Jones collected dust for 40 years.

Now that the album is finally getting a proper release, it’s clear that Rich was never going to usurp either Owens or Jones. But his voice is robust and expressive, imbuing ballads like “She Thinks I Still Care” with heavy melancholy and skillfully maneuvering the tricky curves of rambunctious numbers like “Love Bug” and “White Lightning.” Rich excels at the latter actually, primarily because those barreling tunes give him more opportunity to show off his dazzling chops. In fact, between this release and Omnivore’s other Owens reissues (including Honky Tonk Man and Live at the White House), Rich emerges as one of the most inventive, most influential, and most unsung guitar players in country music.

A celebratory compilation honoring the West Memphis 3

West of Memphis: Voices for Justice, which is not quite a soundtrack to the new documentary about the West Memphis 3, opens with Henry Rollins reading a letter he received from Damien Echols about 10 years ago. Echols had been convicted along with two other Arkansas teenagers of the murder and mutilation of three young boys, despite little hard evidence linking them to the crime. For nearly 20 years, they languished in state prisons, their appeals ignored by the very courts that railroaded them. Describing the inhumane conditions of a new jail cell and the disappointment of yet another legal roadblock, Rollins’s voice never boils over with anger or rage. Instead, he trusts Echols’s words to convey all the fear and misery of a falsely accused man who has spent most of his life in prison. It’s a harrowing introduction to West of Memphis, which surprisingly turns out to be a celebratory compilation defined by the relief of their freedom (all three were finally released in 2012) than by the grief of their wrongful incarceration.

The musicians who contributed to West of Memphis have all been deeply involved in the case for many years, and most of them have chosen songs that Echols listened to in prison, either to psych himself up for another appeal or simply to pass the time. Natalie Maines turns in a dramatic reading of Pink Floyd’s “Mother,” which is only somewhat sympathetic to the title character, and the White Buffalo eloquently countrifies Faster Pussycat’s long-forgotten L.A. Strip hit “House of Pain.” Other artists wrote songs specifically for the West Memphis 3: Eddie Vedder penned the simple, bittersweet “Satellite” as a love song for Echols and his wife in 2000. The music’s close relation to the West Memphis 3 lends this compilation a cohesive quality missing from so many socially and politically minded collections. While there are certainly a few skippable tracks (such as the cover of “Little Lion Man” by Johnny Depp’s band Tonto’s Giant Nuts), overall West of Memphis testifies to the power of music to comfort and console during even the most unfathomable tragedies and injustices.

A Drive-By Trucker leaves the convoy for his long-awaited solo debut

For more than 15 years now, Mike Cooley has played the quiet Drive-By Trucker. Onstage, he’s usually overshadowed by his co-singer/co-songwriter Patterson Hood, who plays the part of Southern rock visionary with impressive stamina. More often than not, Cooley simply stands stage right, laying down solid boogie-rock riffs and occasionally taking lead vocal. Yet much of the Truckers’ mythos rests on the contrast between the two songwriters and, more specifically, on the contrast between Hood’s artfully plainspoken lyrics and Cooley’s slyly impressionistic rebel poetry.

Incredibly, The Fool on Every Corner is only Cooley’s first album under his own name (Hood, by comparison, has three). Recorded during a recent solo tour, the set places his songs in a stark acoustic setting, with Cooley and his guitar accompanied only by the catcalls of the lively audience. “Cottonseed” and “Shut Your Mouth and Get Your Ass on the Plane” showcase his rustic tenor as well as his devil-may-care picking, the former a Truckers hallmark but the latter something new. Barebones versions of “Loaded Gun in the Closet” and “Cottonseed” reveal fully imagined lives rather than easy Southern archetypes, and Cooley adds new verses and new dimensions to “Three Dimes Down.” Away from the rock-and-roll drama of the Truckers’ three-guitar attack, these hard-bitten songs lose only a bit of their power but absolutely none of their purpose.