By Jim Morrison

Caroline Herring: Golden Apples of the Sun" (Signature Sounds)

There's a purity, a clarity, and a subtly engaging ambition in Caroline Herring's fourth disc, Golden Apples of the Sun, one of the year's best singer/songwriter releases.

Your first hear it in her voice, an instrument that brings to mind Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, and Judy Collins in its honest beauty. You hear it, too, in her inner voice, which like Baez, Mitchell, and Collins isn't content to just sing pretty songs. Herring's tunes, the half dozen she wrote, as well as the covers, are quietly compelling tales. And like so many brilliant works of art, "Golden Apples" reveals its varied pleasures over time and repeated listening, anchored by Herring's voice.

Herring is a Mississippi native who came out of the Austin, Texas, songwriter scene a decade ago with her debut, Twilight. For her latest, she migrated north to the Signature Sounds Studio in Connecticut (the home base for a label that has nurtured one songwriter after another over the past decade) to record this intimate disc with only spare accompaniment by producer David Goodrich. It's a smart choice, stripping away anything resembling artifice to focus on Herring's singing and her message.

She deftly mixes originals, smart takes on covers made popular by Mitchell ("Cactus Tree") and Cyndi Lauper (a radically altered and beautifully rendered "True Colors"), and collaborations with great dead poets, including Yeats ("Song of the Wandering Aengus) and Dante ("The Great Unknown."). The closer, "The Wild Rose," is a modern hymn that  borrows from farmer/essayist Wendell Berry and the poet Pablo Neruda. And while the sound is stripped down, it's also varied enough with haunting, melodically altered versions of traditional folk offerings, "Long Dark Veil" and "See See Rider," a nod to John Hurt and her Mississippi roots.

She mines those roots on the opener, "Tales of the Islander," about Walter Anderson, a Mississippi naturalist and painter she's admired for years. The song imagines joining the late Anderson on his rowboat trips to the islands around Mississippi.

Give me a sunset

Of lilac, gold and green gray skies

I’ll give you spirals and zig zag lines

It’s the magic hour of a halcyon day

And all of mankind stands there

Barely awake

On "The Great Unknown," inspired by The Divine Comedy, she sounds like early 1970s Joni Mitchell, poetic and mesmerizing. Like Mitchell, she sets Yeats' poem to music, but changes it from the melody Collins used.

The words and the social conscience unpeel in layers with repeated listenings, but the constant is Herring's voice, mesmerizing, dark, colored and with just the right part of vibrato that Baez uses so perfectly. Listen to the opening few lines  of "The Dozens," told as a conversation with a white-haired veteran of the Civil Rights movement and let the chills run up and down. "I'm just a white girl from a segregated town and I'm looking for some answers that I haven't found," she sings.

Her willingness to question, to explore, and to keep trying new things (several songs were recorded different ways) takes Herring into fertile new ground and makes for an engaging, comforting, and ultimately quietly compelling listen.

Justin Townes Earle: Midnight at the Movies (Bloodshot)

Justin Townes Earle's second album is a remarkably mature, accomplished disc that grows more absorbing with every listen. He's clearly completed a master's degree in the American songbook stretching from Tin Pan Alley to Nashville's Bluebird Cafe to Austin's "Continental Club." The sound is both modern and throwback. And Earle is ambitious throughout. There's the stylistic range over 12 tunes and 32 minutes, but also the lyrical depth, a skill for storytelling. "What I Mean to You" and "Poor Fool" offer old pedal steel guitar and a bit of Texas honky tonk swing behind Earle's breezy, confident vocals that evoke early Leon Redbone. The lush "Midnight at the Movies" is a story song worthy of his genes that could easily fit on a Randy Newman album. "They Killed John Henry, beginning with the big man's funeral and imagining the story thereafter, " tackles public domain folk and could have come straight off Springsteen's "Seeger Sessions."  "Walk Out" is a rag you might hear in New Orleans or Austin. "Someday I'll Be Forgiven for This" gives Earle a shot at a quiet ballad and the vocal likeness to his old man is chilling. So is the song, as sad a kiss-off -- with a lyrical twist -- as you'll hear. The lone cover of The Replacements "Can't Hardly Wait" fits perfectly thanks to the mandolin-fueled arrangement.?The disc's best cut, "Mama's Eyes" makes a nod to Earle's famous father. "I am my father's son," he sings, "never know when to shut up...We don't see eye to eye, but I'll be the first to admit I never tried." He's not riding on coattails here. "Midnight" is charming, captivating, and worth listening until sunrise.

 Blood and Candle Smoke: Tom Russell (Shout! Factory)

Tom Russell says his latest album is an example of "desert noir" and he thinks we've beaten the Americana references to death. Call him an American composer, small c. He's spent 30 years earning that title, chronicling the fading West and a cast of characters from Muhammad Ali to Mickey Mantle to Picasso. He's not afraid to match his literary aspirations—there are references to moveable feast, darkness visible, Graham Greene, and a song inspired by a Joan Didion essay here—with his rich, weathered voice.? He's always been a restless artist. Blood and Candle Smoke benefits from his searching for the next step, matching him with members of Calexico who lend atmospheric trumpet, keyboards, and a more solid bottom that his past efforts. It's a richer sonic palette, well suited to the tunes. The tunes range from the autobiographical, including "Nina Simone" about the first time hearing her voice, "Criminology," about his time in Africa, and the fine opener, "East of Woodstock, West of Viet Nam," contrasting Russell's teaching in Nigeria in the late 1960s while men his age were going to war.?"Mississippi River Runnin' Backwards" opens to "Old Man River" then surveys the devastation loosed upon the land. "Feast and famine, y'all. Fire and flood. Abominations you understand. Don't need no Old Testament prophet to tell me we ain't living in the promised land" to a southwest/New Orleans vibe. He explores river towns in "American Rivers," visits Mexican believers in "Guadalupe" and a look at Native Americans dying literally and metaphorically  in "Crosses of San Carlos." There's also a typically wistful picture in "Santa Ana Wind," another fine duet with longtime collaborator Gretchen Peters. In keeping with recent albums featuring a song biography or two, Russell profiles Mother Jones in "The Most Dangerous Woman in America."?Russell has released two dozen albums, many of them ambitious, over his career. "Blood and Candle Smoke" is one of the best in a canon that's established him as a compelling chronicler and American composer. It's one of the best discs of the year.