Every new Starflyer 59 album feels like a gift.

It’s been 25 years since Jason Martin wrote “Blue Collar Love,” the opening track on SF59’s astonishing debut album. This is a fact Martin reminds us of on Young in My Head, his band’s 15th (!) long-player, and each time I hear that line, it pulls me up short. I vividly remember discovering the first Starflyer album after stumbling across their entry on a Steve Taylor tribute, and getting lost inside it. The record with the solid silver cover is still a favorite – each time I play it, I forget how thick and powerful those guitar sounds are, and I’m blown away anew.

Martin has taken SF59 through several phases, moving away from the sludgy shoegaze of his earlier records into a more keyboard-driven indie-pop period with stopovers in new wave and straight-up rock. Latter-day Starflyer has been a mix of rock and Cure-like textures, and the new one is no exception. Jason Martin can really write a song, though, and after a quick sojourn with David Bazan in Lo Tom, he’s back here with ten more of them, each one a winner.

True to its title, Young in My Head is about growing old. He begins the album asking “Hey, Are You Listening,” which is a legitimate question 25 years in, and then gives us song after song about life passing by, and about disappointment and despair. In “Cry” he seemingly tries to outrun death: “Now I see it coming, coming behind my back, so I just started running, running to make it last…” “Remind Me,” the song with the “Blue Collar Love” reference, finds Martin lamenting that his time is over: “I had my turn, stayed longer than most, longer than I should have…”

All of this feels like Martin telling us that Young in My Head is the last Starflyer album. But given how good it is, I sincerely hope that isn’t the case. There’s a lot on this album about hanging it up and just being with family – Martin’s 16-year-old son Charlie plays drums on this record – and I would never begrudge him that, if that’s what he wants. But as I listen to the ins and outs of this thing, especially a masterpiece like “Wicked Trick,” I can’t help thinking that the world would be much poorer without new Starflyer 59 records every few years. I hope this isn’t the end, but if it is, it’s a strong last chapter.

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The cover of Jonatha Brooke’s new EP, Imposter, is garish and ridiculous. I hope it sells some copies for her, because the music contained within is her usual wonderful chamber-pop.

This one’s a bit more chamber than usual, too, with a bunch of orchestral players pitching in on strings, horns and flute. You can hear this right away on the title track, as it opens with accordion and violin and its chorus is punctuated with muted trumpets. The song is exactly the kind of melodic beauty that made me fall in love with Brooke in the first place, back in the ‘90s, and I’m so glad she’s still here, doing her thing.

The other four songs are similarly wonderful. “Fire” is a come-and-get-it female anthem with some tongue-twister verses that she handles with ease. “Twilight” brings the flutes in to join the strings on a sweeping acoustic piece about human failings: “I love you, not perfectly, not well, but I love you…” “Revenge” is quieter and happier than its title might indicate, its narrator content to let her rival get the last laugh.

Closer “True to You,” written with the late Joe Sample, is the biggest surprise: an honest-to-God gospel song. Brooke sings it with all her heart, and it’s achingly beautiful. It’s the first one of its kind in her catalog, and she handles this style brilliantly. This is the first album she has made with a grant – she thanks the McKnight Foundation for making the album possible – and I sincerely hope that whatever financial hoops she has to jump through (including crowdfunding, for which I would gladly contribute), Jonatha Brooke keeps making music. She’s wonderful.

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From someone I have loved for 20-plus years to someone I have just discovered.

Natalie Mering records under the name Weyes Blood (it’s a play on “wise blood”), and she’s just released her fourth album. I’m working on getting the previous three, because her new one, Titanic Rising, really does it for me. Her voice has an Aimee Mann quality, her songs have a timeless feel, her album has a grandiose sheen with some delightful ‘70s soft-rock touches. Songs like “Everyday” are right out of Carole King’s playbook.

That’s a lot of references, but then, this is an album about nostalgia. It is inspired not by the actual Titanic, but by Mering’s memories of seeing the movie Titanic in the ‘90s. (She’s 30, so she would have been eight when the movie came out.) “Movies” is the one song that makes this plain, but much of Titanic Rising is about living on a fault line, as she sings in “Something to Believe.” It’s about trying to find love and life knowing that at any time an iceberg could tear it all away.

Yeah, that’s pretty melodramatic, and the album lives up. Most of these songs are piano ballads with big orchestration, there’s an instrumental interlude and a reprise at the end, and songs like the aforementioned “Movies” take their time, building slowly, wave after wave. But this is melodrama that gets under your skin, that feels genuine, that has been lived through. A song like “Picture Me Better” comes from the soul, and there’s no disguising that.

I’m glad to have found Mering and her work, and I’ll be keeping up from now on. Titanic Rising is a strange record, but a lovely one, and I’m finding more to appreciate about it each time I listen.

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In my first draft of this review, I opined that Weyes Blood is at the exact opposite end of the musical spectrum from Sunn O))). But that’s not really true.

I don’t mean to imply that they sound alike – they don’t, at all. But both Natalie Mering and the two core members of Sunn O))) use broad canvases to create massive emotional music. The emotions aren’t even all that different – Sunn O))) music conveys a sense of living under a shadow, of something bigger than we can comprehend coming to change everything. In Mering’s case it’s an iceberg, in Sunn O)))’s case, it sounds to me like a dying star.

Their eighth album is called Life Metal, and I love that title. It’s a nice swipe at death metal, and an indication of their intentions: to make something brighter and less doom-y while keeping the Sunn O))) sound intact. That sound features guitars that sound bigger than anything you’ve ever heard, and a complete disregard for rhythm and melody, and those elements are still here. But they’ve enlisted cellists and vocalists and synth players to fill this out and give it more of an energized feel.

I think I might have been expecting a greater departure from this thing, but the changes they have made are more textural than alchemical. Life Metal contains four long drones, the longest, “Novae,” coming in at more than 25 minutes, and the always-mighty guitars are at the center. It’s engrossing, wrapping you up in a rarely-changing river of sound. I understand this is just the first of two Steve Albini-recorded albums coming this year, and if the second one is more of the same, I won’t be surprised. Sunn O))) has done the thing they do very well for 20 years now, and Life Metal is another sterling example of it.

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I’ve been listening to all of the above, but if you asked me to pick the one record I’ve been obsessed with lately, it’s Jandek’s The Ray.

I’ve mentioned Jandek a few times here in the past, and I’m gearing up to write a full-on examination of all of his work, since I find it endlessly fascinating. Jandek is a limited musician with no limits – he isn’t trained, he has developed his own style based on not really being able to play instruments with any classical ability, but he’s produced one of the most expansive and artistically restless catalogs I’ve ever encountered. That catalog numbers 94 albums now, and he shows no signs of slowing down.

Thirty-eight of those albums are live recordings, performed with a variety of musicians around the world. The Representative from Corwood (we believe the man at the center of the Jandek project is named Sterling Smith, but there has been no official confirmation of that) surrounds himself with people willing to roll with his improvisational vibe, and I’ve been deeply impressed with his willingness to try various musical guises. We’ve had country Jandek, jazz Jandek, disco Jandek, funk Jandek, incredibly loud noise-rock Jandek and folksy Jandek, and I know he’s Jandeked up other styles in concerts that haven’t been released on CD yet.

For five years, this is all we’ve been getting. Jandek released 17 live albums between 2015 and 2019, and considering that this is a guy who recorded for 26 years without playing live or giving any interviews, that’s shocking. I’d resigned myself to never hearing another Jandek studio album again, which of course means he surprised me with one.

I’ve never been much for the mystery of Jandek – I think the music is fascinating enough on its own – but the sudden appearance of The Ray set me thinking. When I buy an album these days, I know a lot about it, usually. I’ll know the track listing, the length of the record, usually the length of the songs, who produced the album, who plays on it, and generally what I should expect from it. Normally I’ll have heard one or two songs and read a review or two. Not so with Jandek releases. He still runs his own label and website, and when I buy a new Jandek record, especially a studio one, I only know the title and what the cover looks like. That’s it. There’s an excitement that comes along with having no idea what you’re about to get, and Jandek is the only artist who truly delivers that for me right now.

What does The Ray sound like? It’s a single hour-long track that I have been describing as an acid-rock nightmare. There are drums and bass and at least two guitars. The song is a thick, slow dirge, performed as if the players were all in separate rooms. (My theory is that this one is entirely the Rep, oberdubbing himself.) Atop all of this, the Rep intones a poem about love and loss in his inimitable, atonal style. I wouldn’t call it chaotic, but it does feel like disparate parts forming a weird tunnel of sound. I’ve made it all the way through once, and I’m not sure when I will have the time and patience to do so again.

But it’s utterly fascinating. I know of no one else who would make a record like this one. I’m not even sure making a record like this one is anything to aspire to. But I remain happy to have found the one person on the planet who would make a record like this one, and who continues, against all reason, to create this stuff and share it with the world.

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That’s it for this week, and for April. Next week, something much shorter. Follow Tuesday Morning 3 A.M. on Facebook at www.facebook.com/tm3am.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

I owe Javi Terrazas for getting me into Anderson Paak.

Truth be told, Javi is my in for most modern R&B, since I don’t have my finger on the pulse of that world. I heard of Lizzo years before the moment she’s having now, for instance, thanks to Javi. He was singing the praises of Tierra Whack before anyone else I know. And three years ago, Javi urged me to try an album called Malibu by a then-unknown Paak. So I did, and I really enjoyed it.

I think what I like best about Paak is his equal commitment to two musical worlds. At his best – and he is at his best on most of his just-released fourth album, Ventura – he marries hip-hop with old-school soul without succumbing to the temptation to mess with either sound. What we have here is straight out of Motown, horns and strings included, with modern touches confined to their own spaces. The grooves here are so 1960s and 1970s, and the hybrid he generates sounds entirely new without sacrificing any of the vintage feel. (I mean, not many albums can sequence guest spots by Andre 3000 and Smokey Robinson back to back seamlessly.)

Ventura is a looser, airier record than his fussier third, Oxnard, and I like this one quite a bit more. The first four songs here represent one of my favorite opening salvos on any album yet this year – the grooves on “Reachin’ 2 Much” and “Make it Better” are sweet delights. “Yada Yada” takes a Lil’ Stevie Wonder vibe and turns it into a swear-y half-rapped rant, with a quick stop-off to enforce a climate-conscious message. “King James” just kills, dropping its justice-minded verses over a superb funk beat. The hip-hop influences come to the fore during the album’s back half, but Paak never loses his focus on organic, soulful instrumentation.

There isn’t much about Ventura I don’t love. It vies with Malibu as Paak’s best, and hopefully will draw some much-deserved attention. It’s a compact 39:36, and each time when it ends (with the killer horn-driven “What Can We Do”), it leaves me wanting more. That’s always the mark of a good record to me, and of an artist to watch.

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Bruce Hornsby has been one of my piano-playing idols since I first heard “The Way it Is,” his ubiquitous hit single from 1986.

As is my way, I’ve followed him since then, while the rest of the world seems to have forgotten him, aside from that one song. If this is you – if, when I said Hornsby’s name, you sang the piano figure to “The Way it Is” in your head – I’m here to tell you that you’ve missed a lot. Hornsby’s musical evolution has been amazing to watch, and as he gave us jazz-pop and electronic folk and jam-band workouts and bluegrass and even straight-up jazz, he grew into one of the musicians I most look forward to hearing from.

His unpredictable career continues with Absolute Zero, his eleventh album (not counting collaborations) and his first without the Noisemakers since 1998. I never know what to expect, but I don’t think I could have predicted what he’s given us this time. This record is downright weird, mixing up a lot of Hornsby’s previous work into a strange goulash of pianos, strings, electronic beats and odd arrangements. Oh, and Justin Vernon is on it, too, much to the surprise of people like me who would never have imagined those two together.

But here they are, trading verses on the meandering “Cast-Off” while Hornsby plays his signature chord voicings and sings about being a discarded chew toy. That’s just one of the strange moments on an album full of them, as Hornsby revels in full creative freedom. Listen to the joy in his playing on the mathematically complex “Fractals.” Just check out “Voyager One,” with its stunning horn and string arrangement courtesy of yMusic. Listen to the dusty weirdness of “Echolocation,” on which Hornsby plays dulcimer.

It took me a few listens to even figure out what Hornsby was trying to do on this record. I’ve found it an enjoyable listen since then, even though it still keeps me at arm’s length here and there. I love the theatrical flurry of “The Blinding Light of Dreams,” though, and have been singing along with the anthemic closer “Take You There” on my last few listens. I like that Absolute Zero is difficult. I like that it’s taking me time to absorb it. It’s further proof that Hornsby is a remarkably creative musician, one willing to take risks no matter the reward.

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Speaking of taking risks, here’s Norah Jones.

Jones was originally typecast as a piano-playing singer of jazz standards and soft-focus pop, thanks to the smashing success of her debut album Come Away With Me in 2002. It took her a while to break out of that mold, but ten years later, on an album called Little Broken Hearts, she did. Now she seems to be jumping back and forth between playing it safe and striking out without a net, and I tend to like her riskier material better.

Which is why I am definitely digging Begin Again, her seventh record. Ostensibly a compilation of singles, Begin Again documents seven collaborations with other artists, most of which fall outside Jones’ usual purview. Opener “My Heart is Full” finds her working with Thomas Bartlett, otherwise known as Doveman, on a chant-like piece that floats on an ocean of electronic sounds. The title track reminds me of Hornsby, with its slinky jazz beat courtesy of celebrated drummer Brian Blade.

She co-writes two songs with Jeff Tweedy, one of them featuring his son Spencer on drums, and they’re stark folk pieces. “A Song With No Name” is a lazy ramble, but Jones’ heavily reverbed voice makes it work, and “Wintertime” is a jazzier thing that makes me believe I might like Wilco more with someone else singing. It is “Uh Oh,” her second collaboration with Bartlett, that truly stretches her style, with a breakbeat and lots of dissonant keyboard noises.

Overall Begin Again is another nice departure for Jones, providing new contexts for her gorgeous voice. I hope at some point she takes this ball and runs with it, committing to a more challenging and interesting career. But even if she heads back to standardsville next time, I’ll be there.

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I saw someone ask the other day whether the Chemical Brothers had even made music beyond 1997’s Dig Your Own Hole, and if so, why? I hope it’s not news to people reading this that the answers are yes, and because their work has been almost uniformly excellent.

If you don’t include DJ mix record Brothers Gonna Work It Out or their score to Hanna, the just-released No Geography is the ninth Chemical Brothers album. In the 21 years since Dig Your Own Hole Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons have taken their beat-heavy style through the realms of psychedelica, produced superb collaborations with Beth Orton and Richard Ashcroft and delivered one mesmerizing electro-rock journey after another. They’ve expanded and refined what they do, sticking with the core of it – big beats and bass lines surrounded by sounds that fold space and time around you.

No Geography finds them doing what they do, which is basically soundtracking late-night drives between galaxies. There aren’t a lot of surprises here, just ten more danceable excursions into other realms. But this doesn’t need to be surprising to be enjoyable, and it is, from first note to last. I’m a big fan of the opening three-part suite that ends with the title track, and of the loping groove of “The Universe Sent Me,” with vocals by someone named Aurora. “We’ve Got to Try” is a soulful anthem, while closer “Catch Me I’m Falling” repurposes Snowbird’s “Bears on My Trail” to wonderful effect.

If you’ve kept up with the Chemical Brothers, the quality of No Geography won’t be a shock. If you haven’t, this is as good a place to start catching up as any. They still ply the same trade, but with nearly 25 years under their belts, they’ve gotten quite a bit better at it. “Block Rockin’ Beats” fans should check it out.

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Finally, I owe Chris Prunckle for turning me on to the Yawpers.

A three-piece from Denver, the Yawpers play a wildly energetic form of country-inflected rock, like a punk version of Uncle Tupelo. Chris, who writes and draws a comic strip review column called Wannabe, named the Yawpers’ third album Boy in a Well his favorite of 2017, so I had to check it out. And it’s really good, a conceptual piece about… well, a boy in a well, delivered with undeniable passion.

Their fourth, Human Question, is even better. My lord, this thing rocks. The band comes out swinging on the runaway train that is “Child of Mercy” and rarely lets up. The electric guitars are off the leash here, bursting out of the speakers to light your hair on fire, and the rhythm section propels this along at high speed. When things do calm down a little, it’s like cool water on a hot day. But of course they never calm down for long.

I don’t know if this is the first existential country-punk record, but Human Question tackles themes of suffering and hard-won hope. The title track asks “what can we hold up beneath an empty sky,” and there’s a novel in that one line alone. The absolutely killer “Earn Your Heaven” begins with these lines: “My head is empty, the center cannot hold, I’m studying solitude and I’m the only one enrolled.” These are songs of struggle, both internal and external, and when a quieter song of reliance like “Carry Me” comes along, it earns its grace notes. The record ends with the thoughtful, hopeful “Where the Winters End,” which feels like shaking off a lot of what has come before.

“Thoughtful” is a good word for what the Yawpers do. Their songs are generally simple things, musically, but they have a lot on their minds, so when you’re done being blown backwards by their sheer ferocity, there’s still quite a bit to dig into. I’m still doing that digging, but on first listens the Yawpers have impressed me again. Hear and buy their stuff here.

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Next week, more music! Follow Tuesday Morning 3 A.M. on Facebook at www.facebook.com/tm3am.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

I said at the beginning of the year that I wanted to make tm3am more of a chronicle of what I am actually listening to, as opposed to a series of reviews I feel obligated to write. With that in mind, here’s what I feel like I should be writing about this week: Bruce Hornsby, the Chemical Brothers, Norah Jones, John Paul White and the first Unwed Sailor album in 11 years. These are all new records I have enjoyed, to one degree or another.

But if you want to ask me what I’m listening to? I mean, really, obsessively listening to? That’s easy. It’s Marillion.

There’s a good reason for that, too. In a month’s time, I will be in Montreal with thousands of fellow fans for the 2019 Marillion Weekend. It’s the first such weekend on this side of the Atlantic since 2015, and I went to that one too and had an amazing time. This go-round I am staying in an Airbnb with friends I made last time, and I’m excited to see them again and catch up. I’m excited for the whole thing, though, and I’ve been listening to the band almost non-stop for weeks in preparation.

What is a Marillion Weekend? It’s a gathering of fans for three concerts over three consecutive nights, celebrating this band we all love. This year promises to be special, since we’re also celebrating Steve Hogarth’s 30th anniversary as frontman. (He joined in 1989 after original singer Fish lit out for a solo career.) Hogarth has been an absolute godsend for this band – his extraordinary strong-yet-vulnerable voice remains as supple as ever, he’s become a truly remarkable lyricist, and with him at the helm, the band has explored dozens of styles with no fear.

Part of what makes the Marillion Weekend special is the sense of togetherness, of having found our people. Marillion isn’t for everyone, despite the fact that I think they should be. Their work crosses a lot of genre lines, they aren’t afraid to write songs that stretch more than a quarter of an hour, and they’re a very patient band, content to create an atmosphere and live in it for as long as possible. Hogarth’s voice is, for some reason, divisive – I’ve tried to turn some people on to the band and heard an earful in return about the vocals, which to me are a main selling point.

Long story short, it’s a lonely fandom, and being in a room with thousands of people who love the band as much as I do is euphoric in a way I can’t even describe. You have to be there. So I will be there.

In the meantime, I listen. I know what we’re getting this year – the setlists are generally the same for all of the Weekends held around the world – and it’s nothing less than a victory lap, touching on all eras of Hogarth’s three decades with the band. I’m excited to hear songs I’ve never heard live, but I’m more excited to revel in some older favorites and some newer masterpieces. On Sunday we will get all of Essence, the first half of 2008’s Happiness is the Road double album, and it’s basically a 50-minute song that I am so looking forward to getting lost in.

As if the band just knew I would be in the mood to buy new stuff from them, they’ve just released five new albums and a new Blu-Ray/DVD. Three of those albums and the film document the 2017 Marillion Weekend in Santiago, Chile, the first such weekend in South America. (This was the tradeoff for skipping the Montreal Weekend that year.) And it’s lovely stuff.

The Friday night set seems like a best-of, which I am sure the Chile audience appreciated. It spans 1991’s Holidays in Eden to 2012’s Sounds that Can’t Be Made, including rarely-played gems like “A Collection” and “Faith.” There’s a fantastic run-through of the acoustic version of “Hard as Love,” an astounding “A Few Words for the Dead” and a final encore of the 17-minute “Gaza” that offers further proof of this piece as a modern classic.

On Saturday the band dipped back to the Fish era for a selection of songs from 1987’s Clutching at Straws and 1985’s Misplaced Childhood. These are songs Hogarth rarely sings, and for good reason – they’re not his, and there’s 30 years of material from his tenure to choose from. But the fans love this material, and Hogarth puts his all into it. The band also played all of FEAR, their latest album, but apparently were not happy with the recording, so those songs sit out this collection. That’s fine – I love FEAR, but I have a few different renditions of it now, and they won’t top the Royal Albert Hall recording of it from last year.

On Sunday the band played all of 1999’s Dotcom, an album that does not get enough love. I think it’s an underrated gem, seven lovely songs (including “Go” and “Enlightened” and “Tumble Down the Years,” all favorites) and two epics. The extraordinary “Interior Lulu” remains stunning no matter how many times I hear it, and I love the chilled-out “House” for its unique vibe. A few great encores, including the new anthem “All One Tonight,” round this off and end things on a high note.

I’ve been so immersed in the Chile records that I haven’t yet listened to the other two, but I will soon. They are the next two installments in the band’s series of audio documentaries, chronicling the making of Happiness and of 2007’s Somewhere Else. As a process junkie, these artifacts – which start with the unformed jams that led to the songs, and then build to full demos – are fascinating. At nearly five hours, these two releases will definitely give me enough to listen to before the weekend.

I know I will not be able to explain the experience of being there for you, just as I have not been able to explain what this band’s music has meant to me over the 20 or so years I have been listening to them. It’s a lonely fandom, but it’s an important one to me. In 30 days I will be in another country, in the company of friends, reveling in the fact that this band exists. And I’ll keep on talking about it until I find the words.

Next week, some of those records I listed up top. But just know that in between all of those, I will still be listening to Marillion. Follow Tuesday Morning 3 A.M. on Facebook at www.facebook.com/tm3am.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

I’ve been thinking about what a strange beast authenticity is.

I know some people for whom authentic expression is the most important element in music. If the artist is putting on a show, or putting up walls of artifice, these people would say the music is worthless. I, of course, disagree with this – I love the artifice sometimes, and enjoy trying to crack the code of artists like David Bowie and Beck, who throw up persona after persona, and yet create very personal art in the process.

Like a lot of things, authenticity can be bought. Or rather, the appearance of authenticity, since it’s sort of a genre unto itself. People often assume that if something sounds naked and full of soul and emotion, it must be. I don’t think that’s true. I think artists can deliver irony with an acoustic guitar just as easily as truth, and can speak with piercing honesty behind the gaze of a mask.

I don’t say this to make you distrust every troubadour with a six-string. I just find it fascinating that the physical sound of some styles of music seem to speak directly to the heart, because those sounds and styles can be created at will. I don’t at all, for instance, doubt that Sara Bareilles is an honest, earnest songwriter. I’m a fan. I like her work immensely. I just think it’s interesting that you can tell when she’s aiming for pop hits, and when she’s delivering a singer-songwriter work like her new one, Amidst the Chaos.

For this one, she worked with T Bone Burnett, who has made a career out of capturing authenticity, both in style and in substance. Together they’ve crafted something beautiful – this is one of Bareilles’ best records, if not her best. They assembled an army of fantastic players, from drummers Jay Bellerose and Jim Keltner to guitarist Marc Ribot to keyboardist Patrick Warren, and this dream team has coaxed the best out of this set of pretty terrific songs.

Amidst the Chaos was written as a reaction to the first two years of the Trump administration. Several songs here are disguised as longing odes to lost loves, when they are in fact nostalgic yearnings for the Barack Obama years. Splendid first single “Armor” is a #metoo-inspired anthem of womanhood: “You think I am high and mighty, mister? Wait ‘till you meet my little sister.” Album closer “A Safe Place to Land” is about the migrant crisis at the border, Bareilles and John Legend standing in solidarity with those looking for the security of our land of plenty: “So say the Lord’s prayer twice, hold your babies tight, surely someone will reach out a hand and show you a safe place to land…”

Other songs are less overtly products of our times, but they’re no less well crafted. “Miss Simone” is, of course, about Nina Simone, who provides the backdrop to a perfect romantic evening: “On the rooftop thinking no one needs to know a thing but Miss Simone.” The absolutely delightful “Poetry by Dead Men” sports my favorite vocal melody here, and offers a well-observed snapshot of a lost relationship: “I wanted to be your girl with your hands on my skin, stirring in the cinnamon while you read me poetry by dead men…”

The production here is organic and folksy, with some dips into rock (“Eyes on You”) and soul (“If I Can’t Have You,” one of the Obama songs, and it’s so much better when you know that). I don’t know if the sound of this thing will earn Bareilles more respect than her more pop-oriented records have, but she has always been this good. Her voice is strong, her songwriting voice even more so, and she shines in this setting. If Burnett’s participation brings in more fans of thoughtful, well-written songs, that can only be a good thing. Those of us who have been here for a while already know what a treasure Bareilles is. But don’t worry, we’re a welcoming bunch.

Mike Mains has gone in the opposite direction, sonically, and that’s equally interesting to me. Mains and his band, the Branches, knocked me out when I saw them at Cornerstone in 2012 – they were a scrappy rock band with a shout-along style, and their first two records, Home and Calm Down Everything is Fine, captured that feel. Guitar-heavy and propulsive, galloping from song to song, Mains and his cohorts sounded barely restrained on those albums, just a hair less explosive than they were on stage.

So how to explain When We Were in Love, the third Branches record? It’s a naked bid for wider exposure, full of keyboards and pop production. The shout-alongs have become singalongs, the energy has been replaced with a more danceable vibe, and just about everything that made Mains unique has been scrubbed away. This sounds like something you’d hear on Alt Nation six times a day.

And I have no doubt that was the point. Songs like “Endless Summer” and “Live Forever” sound like they were crafted to capture that particular audience. It’s taken a few listens for me to hear past the sheen to the songs, and they’re not drastically different from the ones Mains gave us in the early years of his career – I quite like “Holy Ghost,” which riffs on the old Catholic school maxim for school dances (“Leave room for the holy ghost!”), and closer “Swamp” is pretty swell.

Some of these songs, in fact, are as good as anything Mains has given us. I’m listening to the aforementioned “Holy Ghost” now, and it’s great. “Around the Corner” is a rousing positivity anthem that I could see catching fire, given a chance, and that one begins with the line “Do you feel like hanging from a cross, do you feel like paradise is lost?” What’s missing is the edge, the live band feel, but it sounds to me like Mains believes these songs as much as anything he’s done, and it’s only the production that makes them sound inauthentic.

Which is fascinating. While Bareilles has consciously chosen to aim for an audience that respects respectability, Mains is specifically looking for some of that alt-pop superstar attention. I really hope this record makes him famous. It sounds like it was crafted to do just that, and he’s toiled in the trenches long enough to deserve it. I don’t love this record, but I bet these songs are better live, and I’d like to hear them recorded in the same edgy style I’ve grown to expect. I’m pulling for this band, and this record makes it a little harder to do so, but I’m still on board.

That’s it for this week. Follow Tuesday Morning 3 A.M. on Facebook at www.facebook.com/tm3am.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

Have you ever intensely looked forward to something, and then when that thing arrives, it’s even better than you hoped it would be?

I know, this is not the way it usually goes. I’ve written a lot in this space about expectation, and how it changes our perception of art. I can’t count the number of times I have waited breathlessly for an album or movie or book, then had to deal with the reality of that work falling short of what I wanted it to be. It’s a process, in my mind, to separate the art itself from the expectation of it – to say that no, this isn’t what I wanted, but in going a different direction, the artist has created something special.

Prolonged expectation really skews that process. The most prominent example I can think of is Star Wars Episode One: The Phantom Menace. It’s no exaggeration to say that I waited 16 years for that movie, and as reports of its filming and post-production leaked out over the years leading up to its release, my excitement grew and grew. I waited in line for something like 18 hours to buy tickets to the midnight premiere, and I don’t regret a minute of that. It was so much fun. But the movie was something else, and it took many repeat viewings for me to separate the actual Episode One from my thoughts and ideas of what it should have been. (I have ended up liking it, despite its many and obvious flaws.)

But sometimes – very rarely, but sometimes – a movie or a book or (in this case) an album not only meets those expectations, it surpasses them. And when that happens, I spend days upon days just reveling in it, absorbing it, learning its contours. Of course, you’ve all figured out that I’m not speaking hypothetically. I do have an album to talk about this week that blew past all of my hopes for it, and that album is Devin Townsend’s Empath.

I’m sure many of you are Googling Devin Townsend right now. He’s a Canadian musician with more than 25 albums to his name, and he’s been plying his trade since the mid-‘90s. Still, I’m not surprised when people haven’t heard of him. Devin’s work is intense, in all the best ways, and he’s been evolving as an artist, rarely putting out the same type of album twice. He began as the sole member of extreme metal band Strapping Young Lad, eventually adding musicians and producing five vicious, impossible-to-play albums under that name. His solo material began as a wall-of-sound version of metal, with so much under the surface that it almost seemed like very loud ambient music, but has grown into something much bigger and harder to describe.

Lately he’s been working with a core group of conspirators on the Devin Townsend Project, sorting his various influences into boxes and spotlighting them. This has brought us from the insane Zappa-metal extremes of Deconstruction to the glorious atmospheres of Ghost to the pop powerhouses that make up Epicloud. It’s been a great run, but in 2017 Devin disbanded the Project, looking to bring all of his styles together in one massive solo album called Empath.

That album is now here, and it’s astonishing.

Nothing I say in the next few paragraphs will be any kind of substitute for hearing this thing. Empath is a sonic sculpture, a triumph of production. There’s so much going on here that I could spend the next three pages just describing the first song. (I won’t do that, but I could.) As a record maker, he’s outdone himself here, and if you’re familiar with Devin’s work, you know what a statement that is. It almost feels like he spent the last 20 years learning how to make Empath, from a production standpoint.

This album feels like an arrival point for Devin as a songwriter, too. The DTP certainly showed off his range, and gave him the opportunity to grow in a dozen different styles. As promised, Empath brings all of those styles together, and it fully knocks down the walls between them. These songs jump styles and genres like they’re hopscotch squares. This thing opens with ambient music, glides into steel-drum island sounds, then blossoms into a full choral arrangement before the loudloudLOUD guitars even come in. Then that first song, “Genesis,” takes us from groove-rock to blast-beat extravagance to video game music to 1920s balladry, complete with strings and choir.

Honestly, it’s almost too much to take in, and there’s 74 minutes of it. “Spirits Will Collide” is a pop song designed to give your ear something to hang on to, but it’s early, and the album never gets that accessible again. When I heard the oh-my-god-how-did-humans-play-this explosion of “Hear Me” slip effortlessly into the Disney-esque orchestrations of “Why,” my jaw dropped. Devin can really sing all this material, too, from full-throated screams to sweetly melodic passages, but he brings in a small army of collaborators to vocalize as well. (Evidently fellow Canuck Chad Kroger of Nickelback is somewhere in the chaos of “Hear Me,” but I haven’t been able to find him.)

After 50 minutes of mind-melting music, which wraps up with the beautiful “Requiem,” Empath closes with a monster. The 24-minute “Singularity” is Devin’s most accomplished extended composition, rising slowly over its first movements and earning its massive catharsis. Only its abrupt ending keeps me from swooning entirely, but I can forgive that for the genre-destroying mastery that precedes it. In many ways that ending feels like a “to be continued” card, pointing forward to whatever Devin can possibly do to follow this.

There’s another aspect of Empath that I love, and it only comes from following Devin’s career and listening to him change and grow as a person, not just as a musician. His early work is ugly on purpose, exorcising his anger issues and his addictions, and some of it is difficult to listen to. Over time he has devoted more and more of his music to joyous celebrations of togetherness, and Empathis the culmination of all of that. This is a relentlessly positive album, even in its more aggressive moments, and it’s all about spirituality and community and, well, empathy. And it’s a great pleasure to hear him arrive here, both musically and personally.

I don’t know if I’ve said enough to sell you on this experience. I hope I have. Empath is amazing. It’s the kind of album artists spend their whole lives pursuing. Devin Townsend is a one-of-a-kind musician, and Empathis the most Devin Townsend album he has ever made. It’s an exhausting thing to listen to, an excessive outpouring of complexity and sheer sound, and I mean that in the best possible way. Very few people on the planet could have made an album like this, and no one else would have. It’s pure, uncut Devin, and it makes me giddy. I think it’s the best thing he’s ever given us.

* * * * *

Speaking of insane complexity, I just got the 40th anniversary edition of Zappa in New York.

My admiration for Frank Zappa as a composer and a player is well known, I expect. There will never be another like him, and any attempt to squeeze his work into a box and market it is doomed to failure. But while he was alive, record companies were tasked with doing just that. The most famous story of Frank’s inability to play by record company rules concerns a four-disc set called Lather, and Warner Bros.’ insistence that it be cut down into several smaller bites for public consumption.

One of those bites was 1978’s Zappa in New York, which documented a 1976 run of shows at the Palladium in New York City. Most of the material on the album was new, debuted and recorded live, and it includes such Zappa classics as “The Black Page #2” and “The Illinois Enema Bandit.” It also originally contained an 11-minute stunner called “Punky’s Whips,” detailing a strange relationship between drummer Terry Bozzio and a publicity photo of Punky Meadows, guitarist for the band Angel. Warner Bros. really didn’t like “Punky’s Whips” and forcibly removed it from the original issue of the album. (It was restored for a 1991 reissue that included four bonus tracks as well.)

Zappa gets the last laugh here, though, with this extravagant and extraordinary new edition. Let me just describe the packaging first. The whole thing comes in a New York-style pizza box with the familiar Zappa in New York marquee logo printed on it. When you open the box, you see the second box – a metal canister shaped like a New York City hubcap. It is, frankly, beautiful, and when you open that canister, you get an expansive booklet, a replica of a ticket to one of the Palladium shows, and five (FIVE) CDs of material.

I know this isn’t exhaustive – only a complete recording of the 1976 concerts would be – but it’s plenty for me. In addition to the original Zappa in New York, appearing here in its 1978 vinyl mix for the first time, you get almost three and a half hours of additional performances from the Palladium shows. These are unedited and unsweetened live recordings of one of Zappa’s best bands, with special guest Don Pardo having the time of his life, and hearing them wind their way through so much complicated material is a treat. The fifth disc contains some additional gems from the vault, and a brand new recording of a piano arrangement of “The Black Page #2” performed by the incredible Ruth Underwood.

Suffice it to say that I have been making my way through this mammoth set since it arrived, and I’ve been marveling at the performances Frank always managed to get from his players. I wish I could have seen him live – I was two when these concerts were recorded, alas. It’s not the same, but listening to the stunning work captured on the new Zappa in New York set will have to do.

Next week, Sara Bareilles and Weyes Blood, I think. Follow Tuesday Morning 3 A.M. on Facebook at www.facebook.com/tm3am.

See you in line Tuesday morning.