MUSIC FOR LIVING: June

Lucinda Williams
Little Honey
Lost Highway
www.losthighwayrecords.com
The latest album by Lucinda Williams, Little Honey, features the roots-rock singer-songwriter at her eclectic best, handling country-, blues-, soul-, and honky-tonk-laced rock ’n’ roll with seemingly effortless aplomb. Williams’s sandpapery twang, with its hint of vulnerability, has made her one of rock’s iconic vocalists, so that not even the harmonies of Susanna Hoffs, Charlie Louvin, Matthew Sweet, or Elvis Costello can steal the spotlight from Williams on this album full of lovers, regrets, restlessness, and reflections on the musician’s life, summed up with a hard-crunching version of AC/DC’s “It’s a Long Way to the Top.”

Sometymes Why
Your Heart is a Glorious Machine
Signature Sounds
www.signaturesounds.com
Less can be more, but sometimes three voices are better than one, especially when they are the gorgeously organic instruments belonging to Aoife O’Donovan, Kristin Andreassen, and Ruth Ungar Merenda, collectively known as Sometymes Why. A veritable folk supergroup—a modern-day female equivalent of Crosby, Stills and Nash—the three come together from other projects: Crooked Still (O’Donovan), Uncle Earl (Andreassen), and The Mammals (Merenda). Sometymes Why is a throwback to the sounds of the late-sixties English folk revival, although the singers mostly focus on American music and aren’t above putting their own spin on rock songs like Concrete Blonde’s “Joey.”

Roy Nathanson’s Sotto Voce
Subway Moon
Yellowbird
www.yellowbird-records.com    
Attempts to combine poetry and jazz—going back at least as far as the 1950s, when Beat poetry teamed up with bebop to make for a quaint but now oh-so-cliché duo—have mostly been for naught. But occasionally, as with Roy Nathanson’s latest work, Subway Moon, the perfect combination of words and music emerge. In Nathanson’s case, this is in large part due to the simple fact that the saxophonist and bandleader is also the poet who wrote this song-cycle of sorts while riding New York City’s subways and writing about the experience itself. The result is a swinging, subterranean journey, given added heft by Nathanson’s Sotto Voce ensemble and guest musicians from his best-known group, the Jazz Passengers, and kicked off very appropriately by a sweet, soulful version of the O’Jays’s “Love Train.” (JUNE 2009)