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 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.

Mastering the art of revivalist folk

The 29-year-old singer/songwriter, slide guitarist and eMusic Selects alum Luke Winslow-King is from Michigan, but he has called The Big Easy home since 2001. On his third full-length, you can hear that the city has made its way into his bones. On The Coming Tide, Winslow-King masters the art of revivalist folk, seamlessly blending New Orleans jazz, Delta blues and ragtime into an album as sweet and satisfying as devouring plate of beignets and sipping a café au lait on the banks of the Mississippi.

Accompanied by his girlfriend, the sugary-voiced, washboard-wielding Esther Rose, Winslow-King amasses a fine collection of traditionalist originals and personalized covers on The Coming Tide. Rose sings harmony while a thumping upright bass and a brass section leading call-and-repeats accompany them, and the album sways with easy confidence. Winslow-King particularly shines in his blues numbers, namely a faithful, slower rendition of Blind Willie Johnson’s “Keep Your Lamp Trimmed and Burning” and a slide-driven cover of “Got My Mind Set On You,” made famous by George Harrison in the late ’80s. Nostalgia rains heavy on The Coming Tide, but Winslow-King reins it in, refashioning weathered words and sounds and branding them his own.

A live tribute album that transcends both the live and tribute templates

As Nick Drake’s producer in the early 1970s, Joe Boyd helped the legendary English singer-songwriter create albums that were remarkably consistent in sound and mood. A similar cohesiveness arises on Way To Blue, largely because the recordings came from a series of live concerts Boyd produced in the UK, Australia and Italy. Exquisite arrangements and recording techniques result in a live album that doesn’t sound like a live album; it doesn’t sound like a tribute album either, since the tracks weren’t gathered from disparate studio sessions. It also differs from typical tributes in that the big names aren’t the primary draw. There are a few well-known acts — Lisa Hannigan takes “Black-Eyed Dog” into uncharted territory with eerie harmonium tones, Robyn Hitchcock is well-suited to the lyrically offbeat “Parasite,” and Teddy Thompson approaches the hypnotic lure of Drake’s voice on “River Man” — but newer names make the most memorable impressions. Thompson’s closing duet with soulful Kansas City singer Krystle Warren is magical, and Hannigan’s voice finds a compelling counterpoint in Zoe Randell of the Australian duo Luluc. Indeed, it’s Luluc that shines brightest on Way To Blue, delving so deeply into the dark heart of Drake’s “Things Behind The Sun” and “Fly” that it feels like they were written for Randell to sing.

A superb collection representing all facets of his diverse oeuvre

Except for the fact that it contains 12 brand-new songs, The Low Highway could almost be a retrospective of Steve Earle’s three-decades-and-counting career. His oeuvre encompasses country, folk, rock, bluegrass and protest music, and his superb new album represents all these facets with a loose-limbed assurance. Back in the saddle is Earle’s road band, the Dukes (who get an LP credit for the first time since 1987), amended to include “the Duchesses,” featuring vocalist Allison Moorer (a solo artist and Earle’s wife) and violinist/vocalist Eleanor Whitmore (comprising half of recording artists the Mastersons, along with Dukes guitarist Chris Masterson). Rounding out the rockin’ Dukes are drummer Will Rigby (the dBs) and bassist Kelley Looney. This family affair also boasts Earle’s co-producer Ray Kennedy, for the first time since 2004′s Grammy-winning The Revolution Starts Now.

Perhaps these reunions account for the pervasive swing in both the crunchy rock of “Calico County” and the chiming Merseybeat of “21st Century Blues.” Even the Lennon-y loneliness of “Invisible,” the gentle ache of the father-son ballad “Remember Me,” and the creeping menace of “Burnin’ It Down” carry an undercurrent of satisfaction, further evidence of a man still in his sweet spot.

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.

Earning the "old soul" distinction with gently wry, ruminative folksongs

Jessica Pratt’s self-titled debut is the kind of record that tends to incite music writers to say certain things: It’s “timeless”; she’s an “old soul”; or to speculate that perhaps it wasn’t recorded in current-day [London/Brooklyn/Omaha/Portland/etc.] but rather a lost folk revival gem dug out of some old vinyl hound’s back crates. This often serves as a euphemism for “did not brush his/her hair in his/her black-and-white press photo, is wearing some sort of vest, and does not use synthesizers.” But more than any other recent so-called “old soul,” the 25-year-old Pratt seems to have earned the distinction.

In these songs (recorded in San Francisco, 2007-12, for what it’s worth) she appears as an ageless figure, a willowy Highlander of sorts, burdened with the memories of a hundred friends and lovers lost to the ravages of time. There’s a wavery, gently warped quality to the songs, as if they were left out in the rain or transmitted through some ectoplasmic haze; most feature the sparse pairing of Pratt’s tremulous voice (here a flash of Stevie Nicks, there a waft of Dolly Parton) and her nodding finger-picked guitar, except when her voice is doubled, a funhouse refraction of an already barely corporeal being. The songs’ lyrical specificity is often muddled by her wry, ruminative enunciation, but when decipherable bits surface from the whorls of her creaky, curling voice they’re gnarled, fractured poetry, borderline hallucinatory — transient spirits, baby’s bones, ghost skins, curves in the road shaped like a toucan’s nose. Whatever is here is not enough. Thank god she’s still so very young.

Finders Keepers is a horizon-broadening enterprise, the success of which relies not only on the interests of a curious record-buying public, but also on the passion, in-depth knowledge and deep love of its curators. The catalogue ranges far and wide — from Welsh folk music and ’70s horror-film scores to ’60s Turkish psych-punk and “Lollywood” (from Lahore, Pakistan) movie soundtracks. “Making global sound local” is the label’s motto, and Finders Keepers, which Votel describes as “pretty much genre-less” is supported in its aim by various sibling labels, each with their own focus: the on-going Twisted Nerve (contemporary releases only), Bird (music by female artists), Cache Cache (punk, new wave, ’80s electronic music), Battered Ornaments (Shipton’s own label) and a new imprint called Cacophonic (jazz — “but it’s almost like a noise label”). Votel is clearly committed to pressing forward — however much time he necessarily spends looking back.

Sharon O’Connell spoke with Andy Votel about running a true label of love.

What was the initial spur to launching Finders Keepers?

Working within the mainstream music industry got me down. It became very stringent. A lot of the records we put out on FK are 35-40 years past their sell-by date, so a desperate, four-week promotional campaign is not going to make any difference to sales. Most of the artists on FK now are — and I mean this in the most positive way possible — failed pop musicians, whether for political reasons, through a miscarriage of justice, the failure of the music industry or because they were ahead of their time, so you’re already creating a new music industry. When we set up FK, that’s exactly what it was. It was starting anew, so there was pretty much no rulebook. It was very, very refreshing.

What does the FK motto, “Making global sound local,” mean?

It’s making old records feel young, I suppose. These records were so ahead of their time that they’ve not dated, even after 40 years or so. They were never middle-of-the-road, so they still feel as fresh as the day they were created. It’s virtually impossible to be really experimental nowadays, because everybody knows you can make any sound you could possibly want, no problem. So it’s hard to experiment without restrictions. A lot of the records we’re releasing now are from the ’70s or ’80s, which was the heyday of experimental pop music.

Does a lot of the archive work you do involve playing detective?

For me, the most exciting thing about it all is meeting these artists and going round to their houses, spending time with them and meeting their families; the records are just the by product. But two things are insulting from the outset: one is when people say, “What are these weird records?” A lot of the time, they only think they’re weird because they’re sung in a foreign language, so that’s…almost racist. The other is people think that these records are from primitive industries, so you get a lot of bootlegging by various companies. And you can’t think like that. Everything that we do is on a very human level, and a lot of it is personal hero worship. Luckily, because I’d been working with Twisted Nerve when the internet was still in its infancy, I was able to contact people quite quickly and find a lot of my heroes. The question was what do you do from that point? So, we decided to reissue old records together.

What’s coming up next for FK?

Recently, I’ve been working with a tape engineer from Manchester called Andy Popplewell. He worked for the BBC for a short time, and has been baking [restoring] tapes for people in Manchester and London and all over the world, for a very long time. But it seems like I’m the only person to ever have asked him if he made music himself — and it turns out he did. He built his own synthesizer when he was 17. He has this unreleased album, TRASE and it’s the best thing I’ve heard in about five years. It’s amazing.

Accessible, American-folk renditions of centuries-old songs

One of today’s most creative and authentic rising songwriters, Anais Mitchell is constantly finding new ways to reinvent folk tradition. She’s spent much of her career promoting Hadestown — her folk opera based on the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, set in a post-apocalyptic American mining town — and the lyrics on her other albums are often timeless, even when they’re fueled by today’s politics. Here, she joins one of her Hadestown collaborators, singer/songwriter Jefferson Hamer, to interpret and modernize seven of the 305 English and Scottish ballads collected by Francis James Child in the late 1800s.

Their collection is short, sweet and intimate, with little more than acoustic guitars and vocals telling the tales of an ill-fated sailor, a quick-witted sister, and disapproving parents. (If you thought your in-laws were trouble, listen to “Willie of Winsbury” and “Willie’s Lady,” where you’ll meet a king who orders her daughter’s lover to be hanged, and a witch mother who casts a spell on her son’s pregnant wife.) Mitchell and Hamer have recorded accessible, American-folk renditions of these centuries-old songs, a fitting addition to the countless modern artists — among them Joan Baez, Nickel Creek, even Fleet Foxes — who have passed them on throughout the years.

eMusic’s Nick Murray spoke with Monroe about her shelved debut, calling together Miranda Lambert and Angeleena Presley to form the Annies, and what the sound of the album reveals about her Tennessee roots.

Can you tell me a little bit about your first album, Satisfied? What was the original plan for that, and what ended up happening?

I was 17 when I made it. I was on Sony and I was in the middle of a radio tour, and I got a call that the labels [Sony and Columbia] had merged, and when companies merge everything goes awry. People get fired, you know, everything just kind of goes crazy. Long story short, it just didn’t get released until after I was already off Sony. They just put it up on iTunes.

How was it different making an album when you were that young, as opposed to making an album at your current age?

Well you know, it was my first time in a big studio and getting to see how it was done. But my passion for it hasn’t changed, this time I just kind of knew. I didn’t ask so many questions — where do I go, what do I sing now? I had a little bit of experience this time, but they both were very special in different ways.

Between those albums, how did you meet Angeleena and Miranda, and when did you decide to record together?

I met Miranda right after I made Satisfied. We were both on Sony. She sent me a text saying that she heard that record and that we need to write, we need to get together. Two weeks later I was at her farm in Texas, and we’ve been really close ever since. And then Angeleena I met a few years after Satisfied. Our publisher set us up to write. So we were friends separately and then one night I said, hey I think we all should know each other together.

What is like when the three of you are collaborating together?

It’s amazing. It’s magical every time we’re around each other. I hope it never stops.

I read that you guys agree on something like 98 percent of the decisions.

We really do, thank god. We’re three very opinionated women.

That makes me curious what the other two percent are.

Well, I don’t know. It depends on the day and the mood. It’s never consistent, and we get it figured out pretty quick.

Moving from one partnership to another, how did you come to work with Vince Gill on your new album?

I knew Vince when I first moved here. He had heard some of my demos and we had written a couple of songs, some that were on his last record. Obviously, he’s been a hero of mine since I was born, so when it came around that we were gonna make another record I said, “I want Vince.” Everything just made sense about it — his country roots, he gets me, he gets my voice, he gets my music. So thank god he said yes.

What was it like working with him in the studio?

He’s just so easy and kind, and when he wants something he knows how to get it. We recorded it at his house — he has a studio at his house — and he and I would just play the musicians the songs were about to cut, just him playing guitar and me singing. They would sit around in a circle, then we’d go into the vocal both and we’d cut them live.

You open the record with a line about being 13 when your dad died. When did you realize that’s how you wanted to start it off?

It’s the truth, and that’s when I started writing. That’s the beginning of my long story and all the stories on the album. I just wanted to get that in there first and say, “All right, here’s your journey.”

Can you talk a little about the sound of the record? Aside from maybe Kellie Pickler’s last album, there isn’t much on country radio that sounds similar.

I’m from East Tennessee, and that type of music is just in my soul. So I didn’t really try to overthink it, like, “Well, are there singles on here?” I didn’t overthink it at all, I just said, “Country music runs through my veins, so it makes sense that I make a record of country songs I’ve written and just do it.” That’s what I want to get heard.

Right. So then the record ends with another collaboration, the very funny “You Ain’t Dolly (And You Ain’t Porter).” How did you and Blake connect for that one?

Blake and I are buddies. We do that back-and-forth to each other all the time — we have that very jokey, back-and-forth relationships and always have. And I think he’s one of the best country music singers ever. So Vince and I were writing that song, and it was very clear that we both wanted him, and Blake’s been very good to me, so he said of course.

How excited are you for the album to finally come out?

Oh my god, I’m so excited. I held a physical copy yesterday for the first time. And I just held it and stared at. Like, it really is happening.

All the tender beauty of her previous efforts — this time in English

The most attractive thing about Ólöf Arnalds’s music is the sense of mystery. Beginning with her beguiling 2007 debut Við og Við, Arnalds spun songs that felt like recitations from some yellowing old elvish spell book, her soprano curling like enchanted vines and gentle guitar spinning out notes like spiderwebs reflecting sunlight. That she sang in Icelandic — with its strange vowel runs and twisting cadence — only made her songs feel more otherworldly. So it’s no small risk for her to write and sing the entirety of Sudden Elevation in English; like a sitcom actor suddenly deciding to go Method, peeling away Arnalds’s gauzy façade leaves the raw essence of her music exposed.

The good news is that the songs can bear the scrutiny. Sudden Elevation contains all the tender beauty of Arnalds’s previous efforts — the wandering-bard guitar playing, the vocal melodies that bob like butterflies in a spring breeze. And though her lyrics are in English, that doesn’t mean they’re any more easily parsed. The verses in the gently waltzing “Return Again,” for instance, are tangled as old riddles. Though the decision to forsake her native tongue could be read as a bid for more mainstream acceptance, thankfully, Arnalds has resisted any temptation to further burnish her sound. There are no horn charts, no swooping orchestras, nothing much beyond Arnalds’s guitar and voice. All of this only contributes to Sudden Elevation‘s dreamlike feel: You can understand the words and make sense of the general narrative, but the overall meaning remains as alluringly ambiguous as ever.

Celebrating the wild and down sides of honky-tonk life

“There’s a reckless side of tradition, a push of the tide having its way,” sings Jay Farrar above a guitar, harmonica and accordion wailing plaintively in the background of “Livin’ On,” the centerpiece of Son Volt’s ambivalent seventh album. Farrar’s sense of tradition is hardly reckless as he celebrates both the wild and down sides of honky-tonk life — and its resident angels — through alternating midtempo waltzes and shuffles played by a stately country sextet. With the possible exception of its opening Cajun waltz (“Hearts and Minds”), this honky-tonk set is better suited for hard drinking than for dancing, and Farrar’s tear-stained laments about the ravages of time and the workingman’s blues (“No wage can buy what the world never wanted,” goes “Barricades”) are conveyed prettily through Brad Sarno’s pedal steel, Thayne Bradford’s accordion, and a pair of fiddlers. Even if it’s not necessarily for the honky-tonk, Farrar’s music convincingly conveys a world of hurt just across the tracks.

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.

A trip through the grouchy Texan's macabre and somewhat bleak world

A grouchy Texan with a fathoms-deep voice, Lee Hazlewood was one of American pop music’s great outsiders. He’s best known for masterminding Nancy Sinatra’s “These Boots Are Made For Walkin’” in 1966, then cutting a couple of brilliant, if risquéé duet albums with Old Blue Eyes’ daughter.

Before that, he was best described as a hustler, who’d enjoyed success producing fellow Texan Duane Eddy’s twangy guitar instrumentals, but had failed in his quest to make it as a radio DJ, and a solo artist. This first installment in a reissue campaign from Light In The Attic, the illustrious label responsible for Rodriguez, The Monks and many more, tells of his early steps in the latter direction.

Trouble Is A Lonesome Town was released by Mercury in ’63, which majored in country music at the time, but it didn’t trouble the scorers. Each of its 10 tracks features a spoken introduction from Hazlewood, in which, with typically mordant wit, he lays out a background narrative about Trouble, a fictional sleepy railroad town in the old Wild West, and the cowboy characters who inhabit it — all by way of preparation for their exploits in the songs that follow.

“The people that live in Trouble do lots of remembering — I guess that’s because they ain’t got much to look forward to,” he quips at the beginning, before an acoustic guitar strums, his rumbling singing voice takes over, and we’re off into Hazlewood’s macabre and somewhat bleak world. Along the way, we meet Sleepy the undertaker, who only smiles “when he sees one of the old folks looking pale” (“We All Make The Flowers Grow”), and the town’s glamour puss, Anna Mae Stilwell, whose husband woefully informs some jealous menfolk that “she can’t cook, she can’t love, she ain’t worth a dime” (“Look At That Woman”).

Trouble was certainly conceived in pre-PC days. Its format was hardly groundbreaking — Hazlewood, then a wily 34-year-old, borrowed it from Johnny Cash’s 1960 travelogue, Ride This Train — yet his style of campfire storytelling is uniquely his. Even on a cold winter’s night in Blighty, it can transport you to the dusty canyons of Nevada. Though, as with much country, it’s not for those prone to depression, it’s a record which provides a rare sense of one-on-one company.

The idiosyncrasy of Hazlewood’s vision is underlined across this superlative re-release’s 15 bonus tracks, most of which haven’t been heard in 40 years — if at all. Some were released under the prosaic, short-lived pseudonym, Mark Robinson, while two others were cut with Duane Eddy & His Orchestra.

On “It’s An Actuality,” an unreleased demo from as early as 1955-56, Hazlewood served up the couplet, “Normal people love perfection/ They read Playboy’s middle section.” He would rattle many a feminist’s cage right up to his death in ’07, but, just like esteemed men of letters like Norman Mailer and Henry Miller, he was a true American classic.

A decade later, Raul Malo and his mates leave country in their past

At this point, it’s flat-out inaccurate to refer to the Mavericks as a country band. They were always left-of-center anyway, despite placing more than a dozen singles on the country charts and earning a 1996 country Grammy. Their origins in the multicultural melting-pot of Miami ultimately inform their music more than their music-biz ties in Nashville. In Time, their triumphant return after a 10-year hiatus, is awash in Latin rhythms and horn flourishes that suggest they’d be a better fit for the Buena Vista Social Club, and that’s as it should be: Leader Raul Malo’s powerful, distinctive voice is at its best when freed from boundaries of market or genre. It makes sense, then, that the group reprises the sultry, seductive, danceable groove of “Come Unto Me” at the end of the album with a Spanish-language rendition. It’s not that country is entirely absent from their music now — traces of honky-tonk (the upbeat “Lies”) and classic balladry (“In Another’s Arms”) still linger — but they’re elements rather than parameters for a band that has reached beyond such easy categorization. Nowhere is that more evident than on the sweeping 8-minute opus “Call Me When You Get To Heaven,” as the McCrary Sisters’ harrowing chants push the band toward untraveled territory; it’s practically the Mavericks’ own personal “Stairway To Heaven.”

A reunion showing that time has given as much as it's taken away

“This is the culmination of a 40-year conversation,” Rodney Crowell has said of Old Yellow Moon, his long-awaited collaboration with Americana doyenne Emmylou Harris, with whom he began his career in 1975. Not only does the album reunite the pair with esteemed producer-guitarist (and Harris’s former husband) Brian Ahern, the rootsy collection features members of Harris’s original Hot Band, in which Crowell served as rhythm guitarist and backing vocalist — guitarist James Burton, bassist Emory Gordy Jr. and pianist Glen D. Hardin. These torchbearers of ’70s country-rockin’ cool (and Elvis Presley and Gram Parsons sidemen to boot) add class and oomph to the proceedings. Other contributors include Vince Gill and Willie Nelson’s secret weapon, harmonica ace Mickey Raphael. While the guest list is impressive, Old Yellow Moon, with its rough-hewn, live-in-a-room ambience, offers what Harris refers to as “living room music.” “This project — like Rodney’s and my relationship — started with sitting around on the floor with two acoustic guitars and finding songs that we love,” according to Harris. “This record represents that.”

The stellar tunes need no pampering. Among Crowell’s four contributions is the cinematic “Bluebird Wine,” which first brought the songwriter to Harris’ attention in 1974. The rest of the album runs the gamut from Kris Kristofferson’s chugging “Chase the Feeling,” to Roger Miller’s woebegone “Invitation to the Blues,” to Patti Scialfa’s elegiac “Spanish Dancer.”

Old Yellow Moon‘s emotional centerpiece is their stunning rendition of Matraca Berg’s heartbreaking “Back When We Were Beautiful,” with the line, “I hate it when they say I’m aging gracefully/ I fight it every day.” Yet for Harris and Crowell, it seems, time has given as much as it has taken away.

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.

A sparse folk record with thorough, unflinching self-analysis

Singer-songwriter Samantha Crain has always sounded like an old soul, her dusty alto worn down by restless thoughts and free-floating anxiety. On the autobiographical Kid Face, the Oklahoma native sounds even more wizened as she explores loneliness, wanderlust and emotional disruption. Produced by John Vanderslice, Kid Face is a sparse record, laced with stark folk and Americana signifiers: acoustic guitar, wobbly piano, curled pedal steel and keening violin. Shambling banjo, stabs of synthesizer or electric guitar add occasional jolts of urgency to the mix.

But significantly, Crain comes into her own as a lyricist on Kid Face. Besides being a meticulous wordsmith (“I’m going to shows, counting my toes and crying over you” is how she describes one particularly trying breakup), she offers thorough, unflinching self-analysis. Crain uses Kid Face‘s songs to examine her place in the world — and figure out how her actions affect others, for better and for worse. “Churchill” addresses the realization that “my whole life I thought I was an opportunist/ But I’m not”; “Sand Paintings” struggles with overcoming self-sabotaging tendencies; and “Ax” is a call to be kind in the face of negativity. Perhaps most impressive is “Never Going Back,” which describes (hopefully) breaking free from a disastrous affair: “The ending of 10,000 dreams/ My soul has finally been set free from his cool eyes.” The song is devastatingly effective because of its economy, the same trait that also makes Kid Face a wonderful record.

Considering the rareness of this generosity, we decided to highlight a handful of those shout-outs — the best well-intentioned, intra-musical nods

But knowing that musicians are also legendary canard-makers, we wanted to consider the plausibility of the scenarios as well. What are the chances that, let’s say, Katy Perry was, in fact, listening to Radiohead as she was making out — which she alleges in “The One That Got Away?” We get to the bottom of this, and more, in the list below.

A masterful mix of originals and covers from alt-country's all-star couple

Married for 17 years, Kelly Willis and Bruce Robison have kept their recording careers separate, aside from a low-profile Christmas album. Hearing Cheater’s Game, it’s hard to fathom why, because their talents are so perfectly matched. Robison, writer of country chart-toppers for the likes of George Strait, the Dixie Chicks, and Tim McGraw and Faith Hill, would be hard pressed to find a more sympathetic duet partner for his lyrics than Willis, who earned acclaim in the ’90s as an exquisite singer with a keen appreciation for left-of-center material. They mix it up on the seven Robison originals included here: Sometimes Willis takes the lead with support from Robison (“Ordinary Fool” and “Waterfall”), sometimes vice-versa (“Lifeline” and “Leavin’”), and sometimes they harmonize in full-on duet throughout (“But I Do” and “Dreamin,’” the latter a gorgeous ballad co-written with Miles Zuniga of Fastball). It all works because Robison’s easygoing folksiness a perfect foil to Willis’ emotionally expressive style.

They’re perhaps even better on the album’s half-dozen brilliant cover selections, which include standouts by fellow Texans Robert Earl Keen (“No Kinda Dancer”) and Hayes Carll (“Long Way Home”) as well as old-school country gems (Don Williams’ “We’re All The Way”) and roots-rock classics (Dave Alvin’s “Border Radio”). Every single track connects, especially Razzy Bailey’s “9,999,999 Tears,” a top-five country hit for Dickey Lee in 1976; the song’s melodic immediacy threatens to overshadow its underlying heartbreak, but Willis and Robison inhabit the both the pop and the pathos naturally, as if they were born to sing together.