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.

Showy in the least showy way possible

The brother of actor Ethan Embry (Can’t Hardly Wait), Aaron Embry took his sweet time making his solo debut. The 36-year-old musician paid his dues as a sideman for an impressively diverse range of clients, including Daniel Lanois, Elliott Smith and Emmylou Harris. He toured as keyboard player with Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeroes and opened for Mumford & Sons earlier this year. Now he takes center stage on Tiny Prayers, which is showy in the least showy way possible. Striking a tone of folksy melancholy, Embry does a lot with just a few warmly familiar elements: gently plaintive vocals, keening harmonica wheezes, precisely plucked guitar and mandolin and flourishes of piano. On each song, he finds new ways to combine these instruments, constantly assigning them new roles in the production. Punctuated by distant piano chords, “No Go” possesses a stately ambience that recalls countrypolitan producer Owen Bradley, while a zig-zagging zither lends “When All Is Gone” its barely contained nervous energy. Graduating from side- to frontman, Embry has created an album that inventive yet intimate, bold yet eloquently soft-spoken.

Her pipes will grab attention, but eccentricities truly distinguish her

Across the Atlantic, Paloma Faith is huge. Her debut, Do You Want the Truth or Something Beautiful?, established her as a formidable neo-soul singer, and she countered the inevitable comparisons to Adele and Amy Winehouse with a quick wit, a wry humor, and outrageously elaborate stage attire.

Fall to Grace, her second album but only her first to get a U.S. release, is best when those qualities come through. It’s a pretty straightforward break-up album, sad-hearted and self-possessed. However, songs like “Just Be” and “Beauty of the End” knowingly subvert the standard mope narrative, while “Agony” implies — well, states outright — that the pain is just as precious as the pleasure.

Fall to Grace fluidly and irreverently toggles between sturdy neo-soul and flamboyant neo-disco. The production sounds purposefully excessive, as though Faith and producer Nellee Hooper understand that bombast is a completely natural and sympathetic reaction to romantic despair. Fortunately, Faith possesses a voice much too big to get swallowed up by all the bluster; she’s expressive and emotive, eagerly amplifying every mannerism and tic as though matching her performance to the vivid colors and elaborate flourishes of her wardrobe. Her pipes will grab U.S. listeners’ attention, but Faith’s eccentricities truly distinguish her.

His finest and most persuasive solo release yet

When Jason Isbell left the Drive-By Truckers in 2007 to launch a solo career, he had to learn both how to sustain a full album on his own, and how to endure and outlive comparisons to his former band — who just happen to be one of the best rock groups in the country. Five years and three studio albums later, Isbell is still grappling with these issues, but Live from Alabama sounds like a crucial step forward in his development.

Recorded in Birmingham and Huntsville, this concert album moves Isbell and the 400 Unit out of the studio and onto the stage, where they’re obviously more comfortable and more commanding. It also allows him to cherry-pick some of his best solo and Truckers tunes, with a few covers thrown in for good measure. Building off their southern rock foundation, he and his band show off an elastic Muscle Shoals rhythm section on “The Blue” and punch up “Danko/Manuel” and “Goddamn Lonely Love” with some exquisitely forlorn Stax horns.

Ignoring the closer — a completely redundant cover of Neil Young’s “Like a Hurricane” — Live from Alabama is roughly bookended by two of Isbell’s songs, which chronicle very different experiences of soldiers returning home from war: a joyous homecoming in “Tour of Duty” and a small-town funeral in “Dress Blues.” Both showcase Isbell’s eye for humanizing detail, and their combination lends this live album its considerable gravity and makes it arguably Isbell’s finest and most persuasive solo release yet.

A comeback heavy in both sound and concept

When Godspeed You! Black Emperor disbanded in 2003, they didn’t exactly go out with a bang: Their last album, 2002′s undercooked, over-thought Yanqui U.X.O., was upstaged by its packaging, which included a chart that linked missile companies to major labels. So when the group reconvened in late 2010 to play a handful of dates, including All Tomorrow’s Parties in Minehead, England, it seemed like a second chance. Allelujah! Don’t Bend! Ascend!, their comeback full-length announced just two weeks ago, offers resounding redemption.

Along with their penchant for cryptic, seemingly coded titles, the group’s facility with sprawling, majestically apocalyptic suites remains intact. ‘Allelujah!, like their best material, conveys an unnamable dread that lies well outside the purview of lyrics (they don’t have any) and standard song structures (which they explode). The expected elements remain – heraldic guitars, jarring sound collages, disquieting drones, roiling crescendos – yet they combine in new and unexpected ways. In fact, it shows the band rediscovering and reclaiming its primary mission, which is to make music that is heavy in both sound and concept.

‘Allelujah! contains four tracks: two short drone/collage pieces as well as two towering compositions that lurch and lumber well past the ten-minute mark, contorting into unexpected shapes along the way. Despite being persistently tagged “post-rock,” Godspeed do not stray far from actual rock, specifically the proto-metal of the late ’60s and early ’70s. “We Drift Like Worried Fire” moves with an apocalyptic stomp similar to Black Sabbath, while a Zeppelinesque exoticism/eroticism defines opener “Mladic.” That heaviness lends the album a gravity and immediacy that Yanqui lacked, yet there are no solos, no lead instruments, no blazing displays of technique. In short, no egos. That each Godspeeder is absorbed into the collective makes ‘Allelujah! sound bracing and bold, instilling these doom-laden songs with a sense of renewed promise.

A long-forgotten blend of West Coast folk-rock and Mid-South R&B grit

To the extent that he is known at all, Ray Stinnett is best known as the guitar player for Sam the Sham & the Pharaohs. That’s him supporting the grotty garage groove of “Woolly Bully” and shearing through “Black Sheep,” two of their biggest hits. At the height of the band’s popularity — just after Billboard magazine named “Woolly Bully” song of the year in 1965, over hits by the Stones and the Beatles — they disbanded acrimoniously and Stinnett, along with his wife and newborn, set out for California. First he made the Haight-Ashbury scene, then he settled briefly at the infamous Morningstar Commune just outside San Francisco, where he expanded his musical and spiritual horizons.

Stinnett’s sole solo album, A Fire Somewhere, reflects that westward journey, blending the folk-rock and pop spiritualism of the West Coast with the R&B-descended grit of the Mid-South. He’s a fine guitar player, with an agile strum that has much in common with his more famous Memphis contemporary, Steve Cropper of Booker T. & the MGs. Stinnett’s never quite as tight as his Stax counterpart, but commune living may have taught him that not everything had to be so squarely in the pocket. A Fire Somewhere is loose but not laconic, with a rambling vibe that belies its darker sentiments.

Nor did everything have to adhere to the strict structures of the kind of mainstream pop Stinnett played in the Pharaohs. Much like Arthur Lee of Love — another Memphian transplanted to the West Coast — he apparently felt no need to repeat his catchiest melodies or to assign much emphasis to choruses or bridges. A sudden key change imbues “Silky Path” with ominous foreboding: “If you go down to see the lights of the city,” he sings, before lowering his voice in warning, “don’t you fall off of your cloud.” Stinnett’s songs meander and lope, but they always end up someplace interesting. Closer “The Rain” begins as a stoner gospel-folk number, then morphs into a hectic pop jam, florid with saxophone and piano. The two halves of the song couldn’t be more different, yet they make a skewed kind of sense sutured together.

At the behest of friend and mentor Booker T. Jones, who was by then embarking on a second career as a producer and talent scout, Stinnett signed to A&M Records. For a variety of reasons, most having to do with friction between label and artist, A Fire Somewhere was shelved and largely forgotten for four decades. But yesterday’s insufficiently commercial dud can be today’s revelatory relic, and the album is finally getting a proper release via Seattle-based Light in the Attic Records (which has a fine track record with Memphis-related releases by unsung Stax horn player Packy Axton and singer Wendy Rene). Even so many years after its creation, this album still sounds lively and wiry and full of ideas, suggesting a very different path that Memphis pop music might have taken — one that wandered defiantly westward.

An unnervingly urgent alt-country touchstone

’97 was the Old 97s’ year: They released their third album and first for a major label, Too Far to Care, about toiling in a touring band and dating an alcoholic stripper. On “Great Barrier Reef” and “Four Leaf Clover” (a duet with Exene Cervenka), frontman Rhett Miller sounds romantically dangerous, as though his overactive brain can’t trust his heart or his libido. The expanded version includes four bonus tracks, including Miller’s tragic trucker tune “Holy Cross” and Murry Hammond genially honkytonk love song “No Doubt About It.” These rarities are a little more country than punk, but like the rest of the album, they showcase the band’s tight dynamic: Philip Peeples’s steady snare rolls, Ken Bethea’s eloquent guitar licks and Hammond’s sturdy bass lines. Like many alt-country artists (Wilco, Joe Henry), the Old 97′s would eventually leave this dusty Texas sound behind for slick, studio-bound pop, but the livewire dynamic of Too Far to Care still sounds as unnervingly urgent today as it did 15 years ago.