Song of the Week

Julie Byrne's lush folk album is a natural beauty.  Amid stunning production values, Not Even Happiness showcases Byrne's expert arrangements, fluid fingerpicking, and gorgeous alto, as she moves through tales that incorporate the land and her traveling spirit, at once earthy and ethereal.  Enjoy a live rendition of "Natural Blue," one of the album's many gems among the rolling fields of her subtle visions.

Song of the Week

Our favorite Swedish pop troubadour is back with his first album in five years.  Life Will See You Now is jam packed with Jens Lekman's bittersweet brand of literate whimsy.  Guitars, pianos, horns, and strings will set listeners aloft in melancholy bliss, in what is perhaps his sunniest effort to date.

The opening track, "To Know Your Mission," recounts 16-year-old Jens' conversation with a Mormon missionary in 1997.  It is arguably the finest pop song ever written about Mormonism, treating it with a spirit of generosity, and deftly using a young missionary's higher purpose as a springboard to the artist's sincere dreams.  "But in a world full of mouths / I want to be an ear / If there's a purpose to all this / then that's why God put me here."  Amen, Jens.  An obvious, amen.

Five Things

• Guy Garvey can sing your dinner menu and make it sound stately and grand.  Elbow drops Little Fictions tomorrow and new single "Magnificent (She Says)" is, well, magnificent.  Guitarist Mark Potter says the album is "the sound of four people who love what they do, and each other."
• Real Estate's lead single "Darling" hinges its chorus on a single adverb: impatiently.  But the track from forthcoming fourth album In Mind is anything but irritating, as the band's interlocking guitar grooves infiltrate like a warm breeze through a covered porch.
• Ryan Adams released another song from Prisoner.  It's the best one yet.  Check out "Doomsday."
• So apparently John Mayer is releasing four songs a month until the entirety of The Search for Everything is released.  I've really enjoyed the laid-back and fluid guitar pop on "Moving On and Getting Over" and "Love on the Weekend."
• Fionn Regan shared the new video for "The Meetings of the Waters," starring fellow Irishman Cillian Murphy.