I know what you want to ask, and here are your answers: yes, I have seen “Deep Breath,” and no, I’m not quite ready to talk about it.

I am still processing the debut of the amazing Peter Capaldi as the 12th Doctor – I’ve seen the episode four times, in fact, and one of those in a movie theater. It’s perhaps a testament to the ambiguity Steven Moffat has so generously leavened into the broth this year that I still am not sure what I think. “Deep Breath” is unlike any episode of the show to date, and Capaldi (so far) unlike any Doctor. I’ll have more to say about him next week, after I’ve seen “Into the Dalek.”

But one thing I do want to say is this: Doctor Who is the ballsiest show on television. Growing up with it, the show taught me to accept and embrace change. Every four episodes, the setting, plot, characters and themes of the show would completely alter – the Doctor would find himself on another alien world, and get involved in foiling another power-hungry plotter. And just as you were getting used to the new story, it would change again. Hang on long enough, and every single actor would change as well. The Doctor would get a new face, and find new companions. The show’s only constant is change.

And that leads to a certain, shall we say, inconsistency throughout its nearly 51-year history. I remain amazed at how Doctor Who can be brilliant one week and unforgivably awful the next. It never seems to matter who is in the producer’s chair. Every Who season has its classics and its clunkers. There’s a certain thrill to that, to not knowing whether the next story, the next cast of characters, or even the next Doctor will be any good. Sometimes, though, I wish for a footing that’s a little more solid. I love this crazy show, but I’m sure I wouldn’t love it less if it were more regularly excellent.

Is there such a thing as being too consistent, though? Audiences hunger for the new thing, but if the new thing is just like the old thing, those audiences start to drift. There’s a danger in doing one thing very well. If you want a good example of that, look to Athens, Georgia’s Bill Mallonee. Here’s a guy who has been at it since the early 1990s. He has dozens of releases, both solo and with the Vigilantes of Love, and many of them are only available on his Bandcamp site. At the peak of his popularity, he was signed to Compass Records.

Mallonee has hit harder times since, and now his career is based around that Bandcamp site. Every year he puts out another two or three albums, very occasionally making one available on CD. He plays house concerts now, and has had to sell off gear to pay the bills. The music continues, though, and on the strength of Winnowing, his (I think) 62nd record, it remains consistent. The question is whether that’s a good thing.

Bill Mallonee writes great songs. But if I have a complaint about him, it’s that he writes the same kind of great song over and over again. He’s done so for his entire career. He’s shaken up the production here and there, most notably on VOL’s Summershine and his own Fetal Position, but the songs have stayed what they are – literate Americana with a focus on the guitar, and few jump-out-and-grab-you melodies. Mallonee has a signature style, and he does it very well. Do you need 62 albums of that style? I’m not sure you do. In fact, I have only bought the ones he prints on CD, including Winnowing.

This new one is similar to his last, the digital-only Dolorosa. Mallonee plays all the instruments except piano and organ, leaving those to his partner in life and art, Muriah Rose. The vibe is quieter, more acoustic, but still focused on that great, biting Mallonee electric guitar sound. Here the lead lines weave into the acoustics, creating a gorgeous web of tones. It’s a good sound, even if it does sometimes betray its one-man-band origins – Mallonee’s a good drummer and a good bassist, but a more live feel with other players probably would have improved this. Still, there’s an intimacy to this one that wasn’t quite captured in the grooves of recent records like Amber Waves, and I appreciate that.

The sound fits the vibe of the songs, too. Winnowing is a typically reflective piece of work, delving into the difficulty of faith, the inevitable collapse of everything, and the need for hope through it all. As a lyricist, it’s impossible to fault Mallonee. He’s always bled onto the page with the soul of a heartland poet, and Winnowing is no exception. I’m especially fond this time of opener “Dover Beach,” a true “here’s where I am in life” song: “To have traveled for these many years and knocked on all these doors, I got tired of trying to bend an ear, I got tired of keeping score, sometimes a son of heaven, a son of hell even more…” I love “Got Some Explaining to Do,” a song about giving the devil his due, and “Dew Drop Inn,” which sports this delightful chorus: “The road winds hard and the road winds cruel, and hearts being what they are, let’s just say it’ll be OK and I love you, just because…”

The record’s one misstep is “In the New Dark Age,” which mars a fine lyric with some dismal synths. But Winnowing ends well, with the lovely and dark “Now You Know” capped by “Tap Your Heart on the Shoulder,” a bonus track that makes for a fine closer. “Only so many days, only so many nights, only so many smiles you can fake, hey reach over and tap your heart on the shoulder and see if she’s still awake…” Throughout, Mallonee’s voice – weathered and aged, but still commanding – delivers these words with an honesty that can’t be faked.

So yeah, I like Winnowing. It’s a darker, quieter, lower-budget affair than Mallonee’s last few, but it is unmistakably him. And that is its biggest weakness, as the 62nd or so of his albums. The songwriting is so similar to virtually everything else he’s done that it can only stand up next to them, not surpass them. I have always liked what Mallonee does, but each new album gets one or two plays and then is filed in with the rest. I expect he’ll stick with what he does best until he’s too old to do it anymore, and at this point it’s probably too much to hope that he’ll shake things up.

Those who love Mallonee – a small but committed number – likely wouldn’t want him to anyway. But if you already have the man’s best work, both with Vigilantes of Love and solo, I wouldn’t say you need to rush out and get this. If you’ve followed him this long, though, you know what to expect, and Winnowing will not let you down.

I have similar thoughts about Spoon, though Britt Daniel and his fellow Texans mean a whole lot less to me than Mallonee does. Which is why I am less forgiving when they tread the same ground. It’s been four years since Transference, the band’s very good seventh album, and in that time, they seem to have evolved not one iota. The recently released They Want My Soul is a Spoon album from start to finish, so much like the last few that it’s nearly indistinguishable.

If you’re familiar with the band, you know the style – bass-heavy minimalist rock, a solid groove foundation for Daniel’s ragged voice. In the four years prior to this record, Daniel formed Divine Fits with Dan Boeckner of Wolf Parade, while the other members pursued their own projects, very few of which sounded like Spoon. So the fact that they’ve reunited to do the exact same thing they’ve been doing since the 1990s is a bit of a letdown.

That aside, They Want My Soul is a pretty good Spoon record. “Rent I Pay” makes for a stomping opener, coming on like the Rolling Stones, and while slow burner “Inside Out” slows the momentum, it isn’t fatal. “Rainy Taxi” is exactly the kind of song you want from Spoon, all melancholy tones and propulsive drumming over a simple, kick-ass bass shimmy. I like the synths that shake their way in and out of “Outlier,” “I Just Don’t Understand” brings that Spoon piano in for a 6/8 workout, and closer “New York Kiss” balances its swagger with some subtle, splendid keyboard sounds.

In short, it’s everything you could want from a Spoon album, unless you want something different from every other Spoon album. They’ve established this sound very well, but eight albums in, they’ve shown no sign of significantly building on it. I can’t say I don’t like this record, but I also can’t say it has found its way into my CD player very often. I feel like I’ve heard these songs played this way before. If you’re OK with that, you might enjoy it more than I do. But with this much potential, I want Spoon to start exploring, to start kicking at the bars of their own self-made cage. Consistency can be a trap, and I fear these guys have fallen into it.

Of course, there’s a danger in breaking out of that trap as well. Just ask the Gaslight Anthem, who are racking up some of the worst notices of their career for their fifth album, Get Hurt. Over the previous four, New Jersey’s third-favorite sons established a core sound – Bruce Springsteen sentiments delivered by a working-class punk band – and ran it into the ground. I still responded to that sound, but even I had to admit that by 2012’s Handwritten the band’s songs were starting to blur together.

Enter Get Hurt, an album of sonic experiments and mold-breakers that just… well, isn’t all that good. It’s still the Gaslight Anthem, so it’s palpably earnest and performed with a trunkful of conviction. Which is good, because when you make a record that sounds very little like your past records, you need to sell it in the performances. The band does, no question. And to be fair, the actual differences are often more cosmetic than anything else – most of these are still Gaslight Anthem songs. But you’d be forgiven for checking to make sure you have the right disc when the blistering guitar buzz of “Stay Vicious” begins, complete with a low, growling vocal from Brian Fallon.

You’ll also be thrown by the layered guitars of the almost-funky “1,000 Years,” the pitch-perfect ‘80s reverb-mope of the title track, and the staccato drums and Bryan Adams stylings of “Stray Paper.” The album is chock full of stylistic shifts – “Underneath the Ground” begins with electric piano over slow, ringing chords, while “Helter Skeleton” opens like a radio-rock rager, evolving into something cleaner and prettier. What it’s missing is any sense that this is a natural progression. Get Hurt sounds like a band shaking things up for the sake of it, breaking out of the trap any way they can, and the overwhelming impression it leaves is that they had a good thing, and didn’t know it.

Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate the different places the band goes on this record, and they certainly dive in with both feet. I just don’t think these different suits they’re trying on fit nearly as well as the one they shoved in a closet. Fallon and his bandmates sound like they’re pulling at the sleeves, trying to get more comfortable, and they never quite get there. This is probably an important record for them, but whether it signals a transition or a retrenchment, it’s hard to tell. I admire the Gaslight Anthem for striking out big here, though. It takes guts. But perhaps, like Bill Mallonee and Spoon, they already found what they do best.

Next week, thoughts on Peter Capaldi and Doctor Who. After that, new things by Counting Crows, the New Pornographers, Ryan Adams, Robert Plant and Sloan. Here comes the September flood. Get ready.

Hey, this is my 700th column. Yes, 700. Yes, that boggles my mind too. Thanks to everyone who has stuck with me for all these millions upon millions of words. It’s deeply appreciated.

Leave a comment on my blog at tm3am.blogspot.com. Follow me on Facebook at www.facebook.com/tm3am, and Twitter at www.twitter.com/tm3am.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

I could write an entire book about Imogen Heap’s Sparks.

I won’t, don’t worry. I will try to contain my effusiveness to 1,500 words or so. But just know that I could do it. For the past week, I’ve been immersing myself in the full digital wonderment of this record, letting it surround me, floating in it. It’s that kind of record, one with a physical presence so nuanced that you could live within it for weeks and not hear everything. I’ve heard Sparks probably 20 times now, and I’m sure I haven’t heard every bit of aural detail Heap put into it.

Luckily, I don’t foresee getting tired of it. I’ve been an Imogen Heap fan for many years, dating back to her time as one half of Frou Frou, and this is easily her most confident, most accomplished record. It’s also her strangest, which seems to go hand in hand with unfettered creativity. Heap has always been an idiosyncratic artist, but Sparks blows that notion through the sky. She is one of a kind. There is no one else like her, no one else on Earth who would have made this record.

And there are very few who could make it. Imogen Heap is the antithesis of the modern female pop star – she creates her records almost entirely on her own, painstakingly crafting the sounds she expertly weaves together. She spends weeks in isolation, emerging into the light carrying new pieces of beautiful electronic wonderment unlike any you’ve ever heard. Every Heap album is stunningly well crafted, and I imagine her twiddling knobs for hours just trying to get one woodblock sound to strike her ears properly.

It sounds obsessive, but the process belies the final product. Imogen Heap music leaps from the speakers, full of boundless joy, unable to keep to itself. It’s the kind of thing that rushes at you in a bewildering torrent at first, your mind unable to keep up with everything it’s hearing. There’s so much here, and it all bursts forth at you in full color. Beyond just the physical sound, though, Heap’s songs are immaculate – they would be strong enough to hold up without all of this sonic craft surrounding them. But that wouldn’t be nearly as extraordinary.

The story of Sparks is just as amazing as the music. It’s been five years since Heap’s last album, the wonderful Ellipse, and she spent those years shaking up both her life and her music-making formula. She began creating experiences for herself, collaborations and journeys and musical ideas, and set a goal of releasing one new piece every three months for three years. Every song on Sparks has a story, a hook, an idea underpinning it, which makes them all easy to talk about, and instantly intriguing.

And though each song was released individually, with a corresponding video, the best part about the Sparks project to me is that the album is not an afterthought collection of tracks with no connecting thread. It’s clear now that Sparks is here that the album was the end goal all along. These songs, wildly diverse as they are, sit next to each other nicely – there is certainly something of a scattered feel at first, but every Imogen Heap album feels that way before you get to know it. Once Sparks sinks in, it’s obvious that a lot of thought went into the running order, the connections between tracks, the flow. Sparks is an album, albeit one with a fascinating genesis.

Because of the nature of this record, it is easily Heap’s most collaborative. She deliberately tried to break free of her traditional method of working – essentially, locking herself in a studio for weeks at a time – by reaching out to fans and fellow musicians in other parts of the world. The first of these songs to be released, “Lifeline,” contains samples culled from nearly 900 submissions by fans. Heap put out a call for interesting sounds, and received a multitude, from burning matches to garage doors. She incorporated dozens of these into the track, but the genius of “Lifeline” is that you’d never know it. The textures never distract from the amazing song. (The repeated “keep breathing,” and the bass line that follows, is one of my favorite Sparks moments.)

For gentle opener “You Know Where to Find Me,” Heap recorded on 13 different pianos located in fans’ homes around the world. It’s a perfect first track – it slips in like a summer breeze, but builds almost imperceptibly, and before you know it, it’s wielding a remarkable amount of force. It’s almost an entire album unto itself, such is the journey it takes you on. Heap solicited about three dozen people to add their voices to the haunting, amazing spoken word track “Neglected Space.” This one sneaks out of the speakers and envelops you.

Heap’s voice is one of her greatest assets, and she usually includes an a cappella piece on her albums – she even scored an unlikely hit with one, “Hide and Seek,” 12 years ago. But she’s never done anything like “The Listening Chair.” In the later stages of development, Heap found herself unable to put her finger on exactly what her record needed. So she built a chair with video and audio recording capability, brought it on tour with her, and asked fans to sit in it and opine on what song remains to be written. The answer she went with was along the lines of “the song about your life.”

And so here it is. Each of the five minutes of “The Listening Chair” encapsulates seven years of Heap’s life – she was 35 when she finished it – and it’s a twisty, exhilarating ride. Every sound was made with her mouth, from percussion to low string sounds to all the incredible harmonies. I don’t even want to think about how many hours this took to put together. Even more extraordinary, Heap has promised to write another minute of this song every seven years, summing up her life in miniature. It’s a song that will not be finished until she dies. (Although I love the ending we have now – Heap asking “who am I now,” only to hear the question reflected back by dozens of people, voices stacked atop one another.)

Heap worked with Deadmau5 on “Telemiscommunications,” although you’d never know it – the song is a low-key breather amidst the mania. Winningly, it’s a song about failing to connect over cell phones and internet chats, and was crafted by two people who never met face to face. “Minds Without Fear” is a collaboration with Indian composers Vishal Dadlani and Shekhar Ravjiani, famous for their film scores. The song is one of the most aggressive, sitars and Indian percussion sitting atop a dark beat as Heap’s voice intertwines with Dadlani’s and Ravjiani’s. The absolutely incredible “Xizi She Knows” incorporates field recordings of people Heap met during a trip to Hangzhou in China, wrapping them up in a whirlwind of beats and melody.

Heck, even the cover of Sparks is a collaboration – it’s an explosion of footprints, each one sent in by fans, heading out in every direction. But this isn’t to suggest that she never acted alone here. In fact, some of the finest moments on Sparks, including “The Listening Chair,” grew from her doing what she does – locking herself away and slaving over a computer. “Entanglement,” for instance, is the closest this album comes to a pop single. The song pulses and shimmies with a surprising sexiness as Heap coos, “Our body entanglement wants you all over me, me all over you…” The arresting strings add immeasurably.

The striking “Me The Machine” was performed on Mi.Mu gloves, an invention Heap helped create. A sleeker version of Steve Hogarth’s MIDI gloves, these capture movements and hand gestures and turn them into commands for sequencing computers. The song itself is one of the album’s most immediate, wafting in on gentle electronics and soaring through its winsome melody. It leads into “Run-Time,” a wonderful tribute to ‘80s pop music that puts most to shame, and includes a delightful, skipping coda.

The two instrumental tracks, the propulsive “Cycle Song” and the lovely “Climb to Sakteng,” were composed for a film score. Amazingly, they improve the flow of the album rather than hampering it, with “Cycle” clearing the stage for the lower-key “Telemiscommunications,” and “Sakteng” flowing into the similarly lovely “The Beast.” That song is the most unlikely collaboration with B.o.B. you’ll ever hear, a sky-high menacing dirge that ends up gathering an absolutely huge amount of power.

The album ends with one of its most extraordinary achievements. After 13 songs of immersive detail, Heap plays with 3-D audio effects on “Propeller Seeds,” an absolutely magical piece of music. The chiming instruments leap out at you, but the sounds feel like movies in your mind – the bursting rip as she sings “I’m growing roots through my toes,” or the jazz band party that happens in the middle eight. You can practically see this song happening in front of you. The fact that it’s a beautiful piece of music doesn’t hurt in the slightest.

“Where does this story go, what does this story hold for us,” Heap sings in the final seconds of Sparks. And after this, well, it could go anywhere. Sparks feels to me like a great leap forward from an artist who was already flirting with genius. It’s a stunning achievement, quite unlike anything else I’ve heard, and a testament to the power of stepping outside your comfort zone. It’s also a remarkably moving album, all that technology harnessed in the service of an emotional ebb and flow that works brilliantly. Listening to it all in a row is somewhat overwhelming, but it leaves me giddy.

Sparks is easily the best record Imogen Heap has made, and if you know her work, you know that’s saying something. It’s also quite easily one of the best records of 2014. I don’t know how many other ways I can say it. You should hear this, and you should hear this now.

Next week, a treatise on consistency with Bill Mallonee, Spoon and the Gaslight Anthem. Leave a comment on my blog at tm3am.blogspot.com. Follow me on Facebook at www.facebook.com/tm3am, and Twitter at www.twitter.com/tm3am.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

Robin Williams has been a constant artistic presence in my life for as long as I can remember.

When I was very young, Mork and Mindy was one of my favorite things on television. It ran from the time I was four until I was eight, which means I was the perfect age to revel in Williams’ madcap improvisational insanity. I used to sit on couches head-first, the way Mork from Ork would, and had the “nanoo-nanoo” handshake down before I was six. Watching Mork and Mindy is one of my earliest memories, in fact, which means that as far as I’m concerned, Williams has been making me laugh forever.

As I grew up, Williams’ performances seemed to grow with me. He was Popeye when I was six, and I caught it later on television, at the right age to find it screamingly funny. The Adventures of Baron Munchausen came out when I was 13, and could just begin to grasp the serious intent behind Terry Gilliam’s vision. And then, when I was 15, Williams took on the role of John Keating in Dead Poets Society, and changed my life.

Like many, I’m sure, I felt like Dead Poets Society was written specifically for me. It’s an absolutely beautiful, poetic film, and Williams shines as That Teacher, the one we all have, who recognizes our particular gifts hidden beneath our awkward exteriors and encourages them. (For me, that teacher was John Guevremont, and I try not to miss an opportunity to tell him so.) There are so many moments from Dead Poets Society that I have carried with me all my life, from Knox Overstreet’s wonderful first date to Charlie Dalton’s fist-pumping “dammit, Neil, the name’s Nuwanda.” I could probably recite it from memory, so embedded is this film on my soul.

Williams acted in many of my favorite movies from high school, showing those dramatic chops that he hid behind the mania. Awakenings still makes me cry, and Williams’ restrained, beautifully measured performance is one of the main reasons. The Fisher King continues to reveal new layers, even now – I remember when, in college, I realized that the Red Knight was Parry’s dead wife, haunting his memories. The ballroom dance scene in Grand Central Station is still one of the best movie moments I have seen. I even loved Toys, Barry Levinson’s sorta-failed thesis on warfare and innocence.

And when Williams voiced the Genie in Aladdin, I ended up enjoying and connecting with an animated film in ways I never really had. Looking back, Aladdin is just a very good example of the Disney formula, but at the time, it was revolutionary, and Williams’ mad improvisations brought it to life. I bet if I mentioned one of his lines – “Phenomenal cosmic powers, itty bitty living space,” for instance – you can hear it in his voice. Aladdin was the start of the modern celebrity voices trend in animated movies, which continues to this day.

I remember discovering Being Human, the 1994 film in which Williams plays five versions of the same character throughout five time periods. It’s remarkable, and I don’t know why it isn’t mentioned among his finest performances. I remember marveling at the fact that Williams could deliver a pitch-perfect comedic turn in The Birdcage one year, and an astounding dramatic one in Good Will Hunting the next. Good Will struck a particular chord with me, since it was written by a pair of then-hometown heroes, Ben Affleck and Matt Damon. Seriously, go look up Williams’ scene with Damon on the park bench, when he quietly and confidently tears the young man apart. It’s a masterful moment.

In recent years, I have enjoyed Williams’ dark turns in films like the underrated Death to Smoochy and the creepy One Hour Photo. Few saw Bobcat Goldthwaite’s wicked film World’s Greatest Dad, but Williams was excellent in it, as a frustrated writer who gets attention by penning a suicide note for a teen who accidentally died. But lately, I’ve been taking him for granted, perhaps waiting for that next role that impacted my life as greatly as his previous ones did. I regrettably never did watch The Crazy Ones, his TV show with Sarah Michelle “Buffy” Gellar, which was canceled earlier this year after one season.

I suppose, since he’s been a part of my life since my earliest memories, I simply assumed he would always be there. So when, on Monday, news broke that Williams had killed himself after a bout with depression, I found myself in a state of disbelief. Stories like this always seem to rock me – I have struggled with depression for most of my life, and hearing about other, far more successful people who lose that struggle tends to make the ground give way beneath my feet. I knew pretty quickly that I would have to ignore social media for a while, to escape think pieces about depression and suicide written by people with no idea. I kept seeing the same question: “How can someone who has everything decide to throw it all away?” That question makes me scream.

You know what most likely happened with Robin Williams? I’m fairly confident, both from my own experience and my extensive talks with others about this, that I know at least a little of what might have occurred, and I bet it came down to this.

He had a bad day.

If you have wrestled with lifelong depression, one bad day is all it takes to go from hopeful to hopeless, from knowing you have everything you need to believing, really believing, that you have nothing and no one. It really is that simple. Just one bad day when the dull buzz inside your head turns into a loud roar, so loud you can’t ignore it. One bad day when nothing you have, nothing you have done, can drown it out. I’ve had them, and they’re tough to ride through. That’s why stories like these always have an impact on me. It’s the same whenever anyone gives in to the bad days. I understand how easy it is.

I would never presume to know the mind of Robin Williams. Everyone’s struggle is different, everyone’s bad days particular to them. Here are a few things I do know this week. A man who has made me laugh and cry and feel since before I even knew what movies were is now gone. I will miss this man’s work very much. I am sad that the man who brought so much happiness to so many couldn’t do the same for himself. And I hope he rests in peace.

* * * * *

You’ll forgive me if I am not in the right frame of mind this week to review music. I thought it would be fitting, instead, to present a quick look ahead. One of the ways I combat my own bad days is by having things to look forward to, even if those things are albums and movies and television shows. (Doctor Who, coming back a week from Saturday!) So here’s a quick peek at some of the records coming our way before the end of the year.

Next week, Imogen Heap’s fourth album Sparks finally hits stores. I’m looking forward to this as much as anything else this year. Heap is beyond brilliant, and what I’ve heard from this album (most of it, actually) finds her stepping out on a bunch of limbs, and truly advancing her work. It’s gonna be great. Also next week, the Flaming Lips’ side project Electric Wurms will drop a 30-minute slab of psychedelic weirdness called Musik, Die Schwer Zu Twerk. Yeah, that’s the real title.

August will ring out with a big week – new records from the New Pornographers, Basement Jaxx, Opeth and the Steve Rothery Band (Marillion’s amazing guitar player), as well as a host of reissues from M83, the Unicorns and the Kinks. Counting Crows roar back on Sept. 2 with Somewhere Under Wonderland, their first album of new songs in six years. Then, on Sept. 9, we get another huge week, with new things from Ryan Adams, Interpol, Robert Plant, Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Amplifier, the always-amazing Sloan, and, for the first time in a decade, Death From Above 1979. Whew!

September will also see new things from My Brightest Diamond, Shellac, Alt-J, Tweedy (Jeff Tweedy’s new band with his son), Weezer, Christopher Owens and Flying Colors. Also, we will get a pair of fascinating-sounding match-ups: a jazz standards album from Tony Bennett and Lady Gaga, and what will no doubt be a droning masterwork from Scott Walker and Sunn O))). That’s along with reissues from the Smashing Pumpkins, Wings and Oasis.

Highlights from October: Johnny Marr’s new solo album Playland; a new Godflesh at last, called A World Lit Only By Fire; a second solo album from Bloc Party’s Kele Okereke; a double record from Foxygen; a new Flying Lotus album; the Flaming Lips’ tribute to Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band; and reissues of Led Zeppelin IV and Houses of the Holy. November’s only starting to shape up, but we know the new Foo Fighters, Sonic Highways, will be out, as will the new one from And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead.

Also coming soon is Transgressor, the fourth album from Quiet Company. I am, again, as excited about this as I am about anything. And Northern Records, the label that first introduced me to Quiet Company, is set to drop albums by Stranger Kings (featuring members of the Prayer Chain) and Low and Behold, the new collaboration between Jason Martin of Starflyer 59 and Ryan Clark of Demon Hunter. It’s way better than it sounds.

I’m assuming there will also be surprises along the way, because that’s what makes life worth living.

Thank you for your kind indulgence this week. Next week, Imogen Heap. And perhaps one or two others. Leave a comment on my blog at tm3am.blogspot.com. Follow me on Facebook at www.facebook.com/tm3am, and Twitter at www.twitter.com/tm3am.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

I waited ten years to see Richard Linklater’s Boyhood.

I’ve been an intense fan of Linklater’s work since college, when I saw Slacker and Dazed and Confused and, most importantly, the amazing Before Sunrise. Here was a filmmaker obsessed with capturing normal life as it unfolds – each of his first four movies takes place over 24 hours, with slow deliberation, and each is almost completely plotless, by traditional standards. Slacker is an experiment in narrative-less form, passing the point of view from one character to another until a portrait of a city emerges. Dazed chronicles the last day of school in a Texas town in 1976, watching normal life happen to a bunch of kids from every clique.

Before Sunrise, though, is a Richard Linklater mission statement. It starts with a fairly Hollywood premise – two people meet on a train heading to Vienna. They are going different directions from there, but the boy convinces the girl to spend one day with him in the city. From there, many filmmakers would spin out some kind of story, full of misunderstandings and conflict and pratfalls before the happy ending. But Linklater just watches as these two people walk around Vienna, talking and slowly falling for each other. That’s it. That’s the entire movie. And it’s engrossing like few things I have ever seen.

It’s even better in context with its two sequels, each released nine years after the last. Before Sunset depicts the pair meeting again after nine years and spending one afternoon with each other, unfolding in close to real time, while Before Midnight catches up with them nine years later, and finds them on a knife-edge of uncertainty about their relationship. All three of these films are astonishingly natural, clearly what comes next, and all three benefit from the real-life wisdom and age that comes to the actors with time. Each is a snapshot of what life looks like to the actors (Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy) and Linklater at that very moment in time.

Capturing the effects of time is a key theme of Linklater’s, and he has found no better vehicle for that theme than Boyhood, the recently released labor of love that I first read about in 2004. It’s a film about growing up, but one that captures the actual passage of time like none other. In 2002, Linklater cast 6-year-old Ellar Coltrane and 8-year-old Lorelai Linklater (his daughter) as the two kids (Mason and Samantha) in a broken-home family, with Hawke as their father and Patricia Arquette as their mother. He shot some scenes with the four of them, then waited a year, shot more scenes, waited a year, etc. And he did this for 12 years.

The effect is amazing. We watch Coltrane age, on screen, from six to 18, and watch him slowly become the young man shaped by the experiences of the film. Everyone else ages along with him – Lorelai Linklater, as his sister, grows from eight to 20, and Arquette and Hawke are visibly older by the end of the film. This seems like a simple thing, but the impact is indescribable. Boyhood is nearly three hours long, but by the end, you feel like you’ve spent a lifetime with these people. They’re heart-achingly real.

I wouldn’t trust this idea to anyone but Linklater, and he proved worthy of it. While some filmmakers would spend the intervening years writing a complex story for their actors, Linklater did what he normally does – captured life happening. Boyhood eschews all the usual coming-of-age landmarks, like Mason’s first kiss, his first beer, losing his virginity, even his high school graduation. We see none of that. What we do see reminds me of the way I remember my own life – snatches of seemingly insignificant events, built up in my mind as the story of me. For Mason, those events include finding a dead bird in the back yard and riding in cars with his father. Little things that make up a life.

You can see Linklater evolve as you watch Boyhood as well. An early scene with his mother’s new husband threatens to become a full-blown plot, but thankfully, it never really does. As the film goes along, Linklater becomes more confident, and more content just to let it all breathe naturally. The final scenes, with an 18-year-old Mason leaving home for the first time, are powerful in a way they would not have been had the film been more eventful. They left me with an inescapable sadness – Mason, Samantha and their parents became real people to me, and leaving them was difficult. But the film ends on a note of wonder, which definitely leavened the heartbreak for me.

No film has ever made me feel the way I did at the end of Boyhood. I can’t point to any one moment, of course, since this is not a film of moments. But its cumulative effect is astonishing. It’s an entirely new way to tell a story like this, one that pays off in emotional impact, even though the film itself underplays virtually everything. I feel like I grew up alongside Mason and Samantha, their parents and friends, and I’ve rarely felt as sad watching a film as I did when I realized I’d never see any of them again. Boyhood is beautiful, nigh-on perfect, and everything I hoped it would be.

* * * * *

Seeing Boyhood has started me thinking about different ways to present familiar ideas. And possibly the most different one I can think of at the moment, musically speaking, is Beck’s Song Reader.

Like many of you, I thought of Song Reader as a bit of a gimmick at first. A new collection of 20 songs, released only as a songbook – as printed sheet music. The only way to hear these new Beck songs was to play them yourself, or wait for others to play them for you. Even as a gimmick, that’s an interesting one, but then I started thinking about the possibilities inherent in the idea. With no definitive recording of these songs, there would be no rules, no restraints – even subconscious ones – holding back anyone’s interpretations. You could do anything with these tunes, and no one could say you’re wrong.

In a lot of ways, Song Reader was like giving up control. It was handing this group of songs over to the masses, and letting them own them. It started to make even more sense when I began hearing the songs themselves – these were clearly more simple, old-school American songbook tunes than what Beck normally gives us, and it became clear that he was trying for a nostalgic approach to his craft. Song Reader attempts to capture an era of popular song that lived and died on the page – sure, popular artists would interpret these songs, and some might be considered definitive recordings, but if you could walk down to the store, buy the sheet music and play the song your way, and millions of people could do the same, it was harder to say which version should stand above the others.

A song intended to be played by millions of people needs to have certain qualities, and something like “Devil’s Haircut” wouldn’t (ahem) cut it. The 20 songs on Song Reader each strove for that in different ways, while remaining absolutely open to interpretation. The versions I heard (hundreds of them popped up on YouTube) felt like old American tunes, ones that could have inspired renditions from popular early-20th-Century singers. On its most basic level, this certainly was not a case of Beck writing his usual songs and releasing them in a clever way. Song Reader is an exercise in recapturing a moment of popular song.

I’d hoped that Beck would never create “definitive” versions of these tunes, so I was a little dismayed to see that Song Reader had been recorded. But the finished product is absolutely fascinating, and doesn’t betray the concept at all. In fact, it presents me with an entirely new way to hear songs like this, one I’m still trying to wrap my head around. The Song Reader album is essentially a “various artists” tribute to the tunes, with 20 bands and singers from many musical traditions pitching in. And with no audible reference point, they’ve been given complete freedom to do what they like with these songs.

Many have chosen to play them straight. Moses Sumney strolls through “Title of This Song” beautifully, while Jeff Tweedy plays “The Wolf is On the Hill” like one of his own works. Laura Marling gives us a glorious folk reading of “Sorry,” while Swamp Dogg brings all the emotion you’d hope to “America, Here’s My Boy,” a paean to young men heading off to war, and to those who do not return. Now, I haven’t heard any of these songs before, but these renditions strike me as straightforward reads of them. They’re lovely, but they are close to what appears on the printed page.

Others, however, have taken things in wild directions. You’d expect nothing less from Sparks, who bring their particular quirkiness to “Why Did You Make Me Care.” David Johansen, ol’ Buster Poindexter himself, winks his way through a jazzy take on “Rough on Rats.” Jason Isbell surprises with his long barrelhouse romp through “Now That Your Dollar Bills Have Sprouted Wings.” Marc Ribot takes on instrumental “The Last Polka” with clarinetist Doug Wieselman, while Juanes translates “Don’t Act Like Your Heart Isn’t Hard” into Spanish for a Tex-Mex workout.

The interesting thing is, while these all sound like reinventions of the original tunes, I have no idea. I’ve never heard these songs before. For all I know, these are exactly what Beck had in mind. In fact, Lord Huron’s “Last Night You Were a Dream” is the only version of any song here I could hear Beck performing exactly as is (save for one other, but we’ll mention that in a moment). Everything, from Jack White’s bluesy “I’m Down” to Jack Black’s ridiculous, theatrical “We All Wear Cloaks,” could very well be the standard. Absolutely no care was taken to perform these songs in a way that respects the style of their author.

I mentioned one particular exception, though, and it’s an important one. Beck himself appears here, delivering his version of “Heaven’s Ladder.” And unfortunately, this is now the one Song Reader number that, to my mind, has a definitive. It’s impossible to feel like this is not how Beck heard the song when writing it. Any other version of “Heaven’s Ladder” will now have to stand up to this one, in the same way that any covers of “Lost Cause” or “Where It’s At” would. Don’t get me wrong, “Heaven’s Ladder” is a gorgeous song, and I adored hearing Beck’s rendition of it. But it seems to go against the spirit of this project.

Then again, the fact that these 20 versions of these songs all appear on a CD together with Beck’s name on it seems to indicate that on some level, these are the “approved” versions. It’ll be hard to shake that impression in the future. I would love to see a second volume of this, with entirely different spins on these songs. I wouldn’t mind an entire series, in fact. The songs seem open enough to allow for it. As it is, Song Reader is an entirely new kind of tribute record, one in which the original songs are ideas, not concrete things. I can’t imagine that Beck intended “Eyes That Say I Love You” to sound like Jarvis Cocker’s stomp-through, but I have no evidence to the contrary. It’s an interpretation with no divinable source. That’s kind of magical.

As an album, Song Reader is messy and indistinct, jumping from tone to tone wildly. But as a concept, it’s unlike anything else I can think of. Like Boyhood, it succeeds at something no one else has tried, leaping obstacles no one else has thought of, and it makes me consider art in a different way. If that’s not a noble and lofty goal, I don’t know what is.

* * * * *

Next week, a bunch of reviews of recent stuff. Leave a comment on my blog at tm3am.blogspot.com. Follow me on Facebook at www.facebook.com/tm3am, and Twitter at www.twitter.com/tm3am.

See you in line Tuesday morning.