As a matter of fact, a couple of days after I heard about it, I was having dinner with my friend Errol Morris, who made the absorbing film about Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time, in which black holes were the metaphorical stars, so to speak. The last time Errol and I dined, we were discussing Mr. Hawking’s remarkable retraction of his insistence that black holes don’t emit information of any kind. (It’s kind of amazing to me that more people don’t know that recent observations have suggested the inaccuracy—as Mr. Hawking himself admits—of his original “don’t ask, don’t tell” view of black holes and information. It’s like Einstein saying, “Oops, E doesn’t equal MC squared, it equals MC cubed! My bad.”)

And yet, neither Errol nor I had been aware of this whole B-flat/black-hole music development.

The great thing was the person who told me about it: Emmylou Harris, goddess of cosmic country music, physicist of the black holes in the heart that lost love leaves.

Emmylou was in town from Nashville for a concert with Elvis Costello at SummerStage and an appearance on Letterman. In addition to that, she’s got a remarkable career-retrospective CD just out—The Very Best of Emmylou Harris: Heartaches & Highways—that brings together the most exquisite and scarring of her black-hole ballads.

If you can get past the first killer song on that album—a duet with her legendary soulmate Gram Parsons on “Love Hurts”—then you have to face the all-time lethal lost-love song, the one she co-wrote about Gram Parsons’ death, “Boulder to Birmingham.” Then you’ve got to deal with the insidiously plaintive “Making Believe” and Townes Van Zandt’s mysterioso melancholy classic “Pancho and Lefty,” about the treachery that destroys friendship.

That’s just the first four songs—and if you get through them without being a total emotional wreck, I envy you. I congratulate you on your cold-bloodedness. You are immune to emotion. Welcome to the Sociopaths’ Hall of Fame.

Having been tipped off to the Emmylou appearance by Observer intern Max Abelson, I thought: What’s the point of being a writer if I can’t meet someone whose songs have both ruined my life and consoled me for the losses?

After all, in my last column I got to celebrate a Venus of the stage, Claire Bloom, who played the goddess of love in Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis recently (The Observer, July 18, 2005). It was Shakespeare’s Venus who put an eternal curse on all love and lovers (“Sorrow on Love hereafter shall attend … Find sweet beginning, but unsavoury end.”) Emmylou Harris is our contemporary Venus, who, like Claire Bloom, raises these sorrows to a cosmic pitch.

I’m not alone in thinking this way about Emmylou. And she’s not alone in my pantheon of sad-song goddesses: I’ve written about my devotion to Rosanne Cash, and Margo Timmins of Cowboy Junkies. (O.K., I’ve proposed marriage to both of them in print. Not at the same time.) And Rickie Lee Jones … don’t get me started.

But I have to say, my extreme obsession with Xtreme Sad Songs began with Emmylou’s “Boulder to Birmingham.” Listen to it once and you know she has an instinct for the black hole in the soul.

So I’m sitting at a table in a hotel lounge with Emmylou Harris. She’s looking radiant in a glowing marigold-colored shirt whose cornflower blue blossoms and green tendrils of vines are punctuated by a tasteful number of rhinestones. Nature and artifice; Nature and “country.” And she’s talking about synesthesia and black holes.

I’d asked her something that I’d once asked Bob Dylan, about whether she thought certain keys or chords corresponded to certain emotions. Dylan had told me he thought D minor was “the chord of regret” (and yes, Dylan’s reply to me was the one mocked in Spinal Tap, and though I’m deeply proud it found a place in that great work, even in mockery—despite that, I think it’s still a legitimate question). And so I asked Emmylou if she had any similar intuitions about the correspondence of chords and emotions.

She didn’t personally, she said, but she told me the story of a guy in one of her bands, Roy Huskey Jr., a bass player who told her that he had synesthesia: He saw musical notes as colors. And she remembered that he’d always say that, alone of all the notes, B flat was “very, very, very black,” really, really dark.

“The funny thing is,” she then told me, “I was reading the paper a while ago, and I came upon a report that black holes are now reported to emit sounds. And that the sound emitted is … B flat!”

It sounded too good to be true, but when I returned home and Googled the matter, it seemed to be quite true.

Google “black hole” and “B flat” and you get 3,500 entries with evocative titles such as (and these are the top three on the Google stack):

“Black hole sings the deepest B-flat”—MSNBC

“Black Hole Strikes Deepest

Musical Note Ever Heard”— space.com

“Black hole hums B flat”—BBC News.

A couple of qualifications: It’s not clear that all black holes emit the B-flat sound. (And the B flat, by the way, is the B flat 57 octaves below middle C). But there’s this one ginormous black hole in the Perseus cluster of galaxies, 250 light-years from here, that seems to have been humming B flat for 2.5 billion years!

That’s one lonely, sad-sounding, one-note black hole.

It conjures up the ultimate vision of universal cosmic sadness: a universe of black holes humming sadly to each other from behind their event horizons. Sadness built into the very structure of the cosmos, sorrow woven into the fabric of space-time.

Are you curious about what it means for black holes to hum? I was.

You know the basics about black holes, right? The cosmic whirlpools whose massive gravitation in effect sucks in all matter that impinges on its field and reduces it all to a “singularity” of which nothing can be known because it has disappeared beyond the black hole’s event horizon. Event horizon: another of my fave physics-for-poets phrases. Sort of the “whatever happens in Vegas stays in Vegas” rule in cosmological physics.

At least that’s what we used to think, because Stephen Hawking said it was so.

So here’s the deal on the “singing black holes,” as one of the Google hits explained it. Again, this seems like big news to me—really big news, news about the nature of the universe. Bigger even than the identity of Deep Throat, don’t you think? I mean, if you take the long view. If I were running a tabloid, I’d give it front-page “wood,” as they say, Post style:

BLACK HOLES SPEAK!

Mr. Hawking told us that no information could escape the event horizon, but now it turns out that information can escape from black holes. And, according to other studies, the “fringes” of a black hole experience “turbulence” that reflects the changing state of the black hole—reverberations from the matter disappearing into it, echoes from beyond the event horizon.

Isn’t that great: “Echoes from Beyond the Event Horizon.” There’s the country song I’ve always wanted to write.

Cosmologists say that this turbulence can be detected as “ripples” in space, and one cosmologist, Andrew Fabian, managed to produce a new genre—call it orgiastic cosmological porn—in describing it:

“The ripples were caused by the rhythmic squeezing and heating … by the intense gravitational pressure of the jumble of galaxies packed together in the cluster.

“As the black hole pulls material in … it also creates jets of material shooting out above and below it, and it is these powerful jets that create the pressure that creates the sound waves.”

“Sound waves,” it turns out, is a somewhat dicey term, since as we learned from the poster for Alien, “In space, no one can hear you scream.”

But the cosmologists have apparently decided to denote the ripples the way we denote sound waves. And they’ve concluded that this massive black hole in the Perseus cluster emits the “deepest note ever detected from an object in the universe.” A tone that it has held steadily for 2.5 billion years. A B flat 57 octaves below middle C.

That’s low, that B flat. That’s “to be or not to be” flat, you might say. It’s dark. This black-hole dude in Perseus has been carrying a slow-burning, low-murmuring, gravitation-swallowing, self-devouring torch for two and a half billion years. That’s devotion.

It puts a new spin on the poetic vision of the universe. Lucretius (in De Rerum Natura, circa 50 B.C.) envisioned all the separateness of the cosmos bound together by Love, whom he personified as Venus. Love was the universal gravitational field. Emmylou’s B-flat black-hole revelation—I’m not saying she discovered it, but it was a revelation to me when she told me—suggests metaphorically a different kind of universe. One that’s not bound by love, but by sorrow. With black holes “singing to each other like whales,” as Errol Morris put it when I told him about it.

Who can resist the image of the vast reaches of interstellar space filled with lonely, heartbroken black holes humming their mournful B flats to each other across the endless vistas of the cosmos?

Is this getting a little cosmic? O.K., probably yes—but while we’re on the subject of “cosmic”: I came upon a resonant detail while leafing through the stack of Emmylou clippings that her manager, Emily Deaderick, provided me. It had to do with what Gram Parsons called the kind of music that he and Emmylou practically invented on his final album, Grievous Angel.

Some fusion of traditional country’s naked emotion with contemporary rock sensibility. Is it “country rock,” “alt-country” or that hideous new term, “Americana”? Country stars are forever getting talked into trying to make themselves “crossover artists” by ambitious agents who make them ashamed of being “country artists” and want them to be called something else.

I’ll never forget the morning after my deeply appreciative portrait of Rodney Crowell appeared in The Observer (“Beautiful Despair!”, March 7, 2005). I got an early-morning call from Rodney in Nashville. O.K., I admit it: I was half-expecting that he’d ask me to be his co-writer (I’d compared him to Graham Greene, for God’s sake!).

But nooooo …. He was angry! He told me that I’d “ruined” all the work he and his management had put in over the past three years, because I’d described him as a country-and-western singer-songwriter (which is how most of the people who love his work know him). Horrors!

It turns out that he wanted to escape the “country” label and become a “crossover artist”; he wanted to be known for his recent topical songs rather than for the kind of all-time killers like “’Til I Gain Control Again,” guaranteed to be immortal.

I told him that he ought to be proud to be part of the heritage of country music. But just the other day, I was listening to one of the country-music cable channels and heard one of Rodney’s songs classified as “Americana.” Poor Rodney: all that struggle to escape “country” for a label as vapid and marginal as “Americana”? Congratulations, dude.

“Americana”! It sounds less like music than some Antiques Roadshow category. It’s for country singers ashamed of being country, folkies ashamed of being folkies, bluegrass heads ashamed of sounding too “rural.” It should be called “Ashamed-icana.” Out with it! Let’s abolish “Americana” from the American musical vocabulary now!

Emmylou Harris has never had that problem. It’s like she has too much integrity to care what people call her music, even if she knows it can make a difference in radio and airplay. She just wants to sing it and shatter your heart.

But there is one term she does kind of like. It’s the one I found in the old clip, the one Gram Parsons coined: “Cosmic American music.” I like it, too! There’s always been something spiritual about it. All the more suggestive now that we know about the sorrowful songs of the black holes, that there’s something cosmic about sorrow, something built into the structure of creation.

I asked Emmylou about one of the most beautiful and simple songs she’s done, the duet she does with Willie Nelson on “Gulf Coast Highway,” a Nanci Griffith song. (It’s on Emmylou’s amazing Duets album.) Simple, but there’s something cosmic about its simplicity, the way Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience are simple and cosmic at the same time.

I started to tell her: “I heard a story that you were driving along and this Nanci Griffith song [“Gulf Coast Highway”] came on the car radio and—”

“I almost had to pull off to the side of the road and started to cry. Yes!” she said.

Do you know “Gulf Coast Highway”? It all has to do with bluebonnets. They apparently grow on only one stretch of the Texas Gulf Coast Highway, and they only bloom briefly in the spring. It’s a song about a mother and father who worked all their lives in obscurity, but lived in “the only place on earth bluebonnets grow,” and about the way they loved their life and—memorably—about the way they described their death:

And when he dies, he says, he’ll catch some blackbird’s wing

And we will fly away to heaven come some sweet bluebonnet spring.

It’s hard to explain why this song gets to you, but Emmylou says it has something to do with courage. The courage of people who keep their love together till death do them part. The kind of enduring love some of our parents had, the kind that’s so rare now. Certainly rare in her songs, which are mostly about fire and ashes and loss.

I asked her, since I consider her a goddess of wisdom on the subject of love and love songs, whether we really love love, or do we love the despair that inevitably comes with its loss? Because we can have that “beautiful despair” (as Americana artist Rodney Crowell calls it) forever in luminous, sad love songs like hers that keep the beautiful lost love alive. It never leaves us like love does.

She said something wise about the pain in her songs: that “often people who are hurt say they can’t feel anything, and sometimes songs like these at least help them feel something, even if it’s painful.”

It’s true there are solace and consolation in them, but there are also dark echoes of that 2.5-billion-year-old B flat.

As a matter of fact, a couple of days after I heard about it, I was having dinner with my friend Errol Morris, who made the absorbing film about Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time, in which black holes were the metaphorical stars, so to speak. The last time Errol and I dined, we were discussing Mr. Hawking’s remarkable retraction of his insistence that black holes don’t emit information of any kind. (It’s kind of amazing to me that more people don’t know that recent observations have suggested the inaccuracy—as Mr. Hawking himself admits—of his original “don’t ask, don’t tell” view of black holes and information. It’s like Einstein saying, “Oops, E doesn’t equal MC squared, it equals MC cubed! My bad.”)

And yet, neither Errol nor I had been aware of this whole B-flat/black-hole music development.

The great thing was the person who told me about it: Emmylou Harris, goddess of cosmic country music, physicist of the black holes in the heart that lost love leaves.

Emmylou was in town from Nashville for a concert with Elvis Costello at SummerStage and an appearance on Letterman. In addition to that, she’s got a remarkable career-retrospective CD just out—The Very Best of Emmylou Harris: Heartaches & Highways—that brings together the most exquisite and scarring of her black-hole ballads.

If you can get past the first killer song on that album—a duet with her legendary soulmate Gram Parsons on “Love Hurts”—then you have to face the all-time lethal lost-love song, the one she co-wrote about Gram Parsons’ death, “Boulder to Birmingham.” Then you’ve got to deal with the insidiously plaintive “Making Believe” and Townes Van Zandt’s mysterioso melancholy classic “Pancho and Lefty,” about the treachery that destroys friendship.

That’s just the first four songs—and if you get through them without being a total emotional wreck, I envy you. I congratulate you on your cold-bloodedness. You are immune to emotion. Welcome to the Sociopaths’ Hall of Fame.

Having been tipped off to the Emmylou appearance by Observer intern Max Abelson, I thought: What’s the point of being a writer if I can’t meet someone whose songs have both ruined my life and consoled me for the losses?

After all, in my last column I got to celebrate a Venus of the stage, Claire Bloom, who played the goddess of love in Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis recently (The Observer, July 18, 2005). It was Shakespeare’s Venus who put an eternal curse on all love and lovers (“Sorrow on Love hereafter shall attend … Find sweet beginning, but unsavoury end.”) Emmylou Harris is our contemporary Venus, who, like Claire Bloom, raises these sorrows to a cosmic pitch.

I’m not alone in thinking this way about Emmylou. And she’s not alone in my pantheon of sad-song goddesses: I’ve written about my devotion to Rosanne Cash, and Margo Timmins of Cowboy Junkies. (O.K., I’ve proposed marriage to both of them in print. Not at the same time.) And Rickie Lee Jones … don’t get me started.

But I have to say, my extreme obsession with Xtreme Sad Songs began with Emmylou’s “Boulder to Birmingham.” Listen to it once and you know she has an instinct for the black hole in the soul.

So I’m sitting at a table in a hotel lounge with Emmylou Harris. She’s looking radiant in a glowing marigold-colored shirt whose cornflower blue blossoms and green tendrils of vines are punctuated by a tasteful number of rhinestones. Nature and artifice; Nature and “country.” And she’s talking about synesthesia and black holes.

I’d asked her something that I’d once asked Bob Dylan, about whether she thought certain keys or chords corresponded to certain emotions. Dylan had told me he thought D minor was “the chord of regret” (and yes, Dylan’s reply to me was the one mocked in Spinal Tap, and though I’m deeply proud it found a place in that great work, even in mockery—despite that, I think it’s still a legitimate question). And so I asked Emmylou if she had any similar intuitions about the correspondence of chords and emotions.

She didn’t personally, she said, but she told me the story of a guy in one of her bands, Roy Huskey Jr., a bass player who told her that he had synesthesia: He saw musical notes as colors. And she remembered that he’d always say that, alone of all the notes, B flat was “very, very, very black,” really, really dark.

“The funny thing is,” she then told me, “I was reading the paper a while ago, and I came upon a report that black holes are now reported to emit sounds. And that the sound emitted is … B flat!”

It sounded too good to be true, but when I returned home and Googled the matter, it seemed to be quite true.

Google “black hole” and “B flat” and you get 3,500 entries with evocative titles such as (and these are the top three on the Google stack):

“Black hole sings the deepest B-flat”—MSNBC

“Black Hole Strikes Deepest

Musical Note Ever Heard”— space.com

“Black hole hums B flat”—BBC News.

A couple of qualifications: It’s not clear that all black holes emit the B-flat sound. (And the B flat, by the way, is the B flat 57 octaves below middle C). But there’s this one ginormous black hole in the Perseus cluster of galaxies, 250 light-years from here, that seems to have been humming B flat for 2.5 billion years!

That’s one lonely, sad-sounding, one-note black hole.

It conjures up the ultimate vision of universal cosmic sadness: a universe of black holes humming sadly to each other from behind their event horizons. Sadness built into the very structure of the cosmos, sorrow woven into the fabric of space-time.

Are you curious about what it means for black holes to hum? I was.

You know the basics about black holes, right? The cosmic whirlpools whose massive gravitation in effect sucks in all matter that impinges on its field and reduces it all to a “singularity” of which nothing can be known because it has disappeared beyond the black hole’s event horizon. Event horizon: another of my fave physics-for-poets phrases. Sort of the “whatever happens in Vegas stays in Vegas” rule in cosmological physics.

At least that’s what we used to think, because Stephen Hawking said it was so.

So here’s the deal on the “singing black holes,” as one of the Google hits explained it. Again, this seems like big news to me—really big news, news about the nature of the universe. Bigger even than the identity of Deep Throat, don’t you think? I mean, if you take the long view. If I were running a tabloid, I’d give it front-page “wood,” as they say, Post style:

BLACK HOLES SPEAK!

Mr. Hawking told us that no information could escape the event horizon, but now it turns out that information can escape from black holes. And, according to other studies, the “fringes” of a black hole experience “turbulence” that reflects the changing state of the black hole—reverberations from the matter disappearing into it, echoes from beyond the event horizon.

Isn’t that great: “Echoes from Beyond the Event Horizon.” There’s the country song I’ve always wanted to write.

Cosmologists say that this turbulence can be detected as “ripples” in space, and one cosmologist, Andrew Fabian, managed to produce a new genre—call it orgiastic cosmological porn—in describing it:

“The ripples were caused by the rhythmic squeezing and heating … by the intense gravitational pressure of the jumble of galaxies packed together in the cluster.

“As the black hole pulls material in … it also creates jets of material shooting out above and below it, and it is these powerful jets that create the pressure that creates the sound waves.”

“Sound waves,” it turns out, is a somewhat dicey term, since as we learned from the poster for Alien, “In space, no one can hear you scream.”

But the cosmologists have apparently decided to denote the ripples the way we denote sound waves. And they’ve concluded that this massive black hole in the Perseus cluster emits the “deepest note ever detected from an object in the universe.” A tone that it has held steadily for 2.5 billion years. A B flat 57 octaves below middle C.

That’s low, that B flat. That’s “to be or not to be” flat, you might say. It’s dark. This black-hole dude in Perseus has been carrying a slow-burning, low-murmuring, gravitation-swallowing, self-devouring torch for two and a half billion years. That’s devotion.

It puts a new spin on the poetic vision of the universe. Lucretius (in De Rerum Natura, circa 50 B.C.) envisioned all the separateness of the cosmos bound together by Love, whom he personified as Venus. Love was the universal gravitational field. Emmylou’s B-flat black-hole revelation—I’m not saying she discovered it, but it was a revelation to me when she told me—suggests metaphorically a different kind of universe. One that’s not bound by love, but by sorrow. With black holes “singing to each other like whales,” as Errol Morris put it when I told him about it.

Who can resist the image of the vast reaches of interstellar space filled with lonely, heartbroken black holes humming their mournful B flats to each other across the endless vistas of the cosmos?

Is this getting a little cosmic? O.K., probably yes—but while we’re on the subject of “cosmic”: I came upon a resonant detail while leafing through the stack of Emmylou clippings that her manager, Emily Deaderick, provided me. It had to do with what Gram Parsons called the kind of music that he and Emmylou practically invented on his final album, Grievous Angel.

Some fusion of traditional country’s naked emotion with contemporary rock sensibility. Is it “country rock,” “alt-country” or that hideous new term, “Americana”? Country stars are forever getting talked into trying to make themselves “crossover artists” by ambitious agents who make them ashamed of being “country artists” and want them to be called something else.

I’ll never forget the morning after my deeply appreciative portrait of Rodney Crowell appeared in The Observer (“Beautiful Despair!”, March 7, 2005). I got an early-morning call from Rodney in Nashville. O.K., I admit it: I was half-expecting that he’d ask me to be his co-writer (I’d compared him to Graham Greene, for God’s sake!).

But nooooo …. He was angry! He told me that I’d “ruined” all the work he and his management had put in over the past three years, because I’d described him as a country-and-western singer-songwriter (which is how most of the people who love his work know him). Horrors!

It turns out that he wanted to escape the “country” label and become a “crossover artist”; he wanted to be known for his recent topical songs rather than for the kind of all-time killers like “’Til I Gain Control Again,” guaranteed to be immortal.

I told him that he ought to be proud to be part of the heritage of country music. But just the other day, I was listening to one of the country-music cable channels and heard one of Rodney’s songs classified as “Americana.” Poor Rodney: all that struggle to escape “country” for a label as vapid and marginal as “Americana”? Congratulations, dude.

“Americana”! It sounds less like music than some Antiques Roadshow category. It’s for country singers ashamed of being country, folkies ashamed of being folkies, bluegrass heads ashamed of sounding too “rural.” It should be called “Ashamed-icana.” Out with it! Let’s abolish “Americana” from the American musical vocabulary now!

Emmylou Harris has never had that problem. It’s like she has too much integrity to care what people call her music, even if she knows it can make a difference in radio and airplay. She just wants to sing it and shatter your heart.

But there is one term she does kind of like. It’s the one I found in the old clip, the one Gram Parsons coined: “Cosmic American music.” I like it, too! There’s always been something spiritual about it. All the more suggestive now that we know about the sorrowful songs of the black holes, that there’s something cosmic about sorrow, something built into the structure of creation.

I asked Emmylou about one of the most beautiful and simple songs she’s done, the duet she does with Willie Nelson on “Gulf Coast Highway,” a Nanci Griffith song. (It’s on Emmylou’s amazing Duets album.) Simple, but there’s something cosmic about its simplicity, the way Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience are simple and cosmic at the same time.

I started to tell her: “I heard a story that you were driving along and this Nanci Griffith song [“Gulf Coast Highway”] came on the car radio and—”

“I almost had to pull off to the side of the road and started to cry. Yes!” she said.

Do you know “Gulf Coast Highway”? It all has to do with bluebonnets. They apparently grow on only one stretch of the Texas Gulf Coast Highway, and they only bloom briefly in the spring. It’s a song about a mother and father who worked all their lives in obscurity, but lived in “the only place on earth bluebonnets grow,” and about the way they loved their life and—memorably—about the way they described their death:

And when he dies, he says, he’ll catch some blackbird’s wing

And we will fly away to heaven come some sweet bluebonnet spring.

It’s hard to explain why this song gets to you, but Emmylou says it has something to do with courage. The courage of people who keep their love together till death do them part. The kind of enduring love some of our parents had, the kind that’s so rare now. Certainly rare in her songs, which are mostly about fire and ashes and loss.

I asked her, since I consider her a goddess of wisdom on the subject of love and love songs, whether we really love love, or do we love the despair that inevitably comes with its loss? Because we can have that “beautiful despair” (as Americana artist Rodney Crowell calls it) forever in luminous, sad love songs like hers that keep the beautiful lost love alive. It never leaves us like love does.

She said something wise about the pain in her songs: that “often people who are hurt say they can’t feel anything, and sometimes songs like these at least help them feel something, even if it’s painful.”

It’s true there are solace and consolation in them, but there are also dark echoes of that 2.5-billion-year-old B flat.

Call me crazy, but there's a Radiohead backlash brewing. It has nothing to do with whether or not Radiohead are pretentious. Of course they are. Always have been. But who cares–other than pop critics, of course? No, the problem stems from the fact that the arty English quintet hasn't lived up to expectations. Their fourth album, Kid A– more a collection of meandering mood pieces than songs–may have debuted at No. 1 around the world last October, but secretly, fans reasoned the boys had to get this one out of their system before returning to good old angst-ridden rock.

Now, a mere eight months later, Radiohead is back with Amnesiac (Capitol). Advance word–or hope–was that it would contain more "accessible" material from the Kid A sessions. Once the new music made its inevitable appearance on the Web about six weeks ago, however, that notion dissolved. Yes, Amnesiac boasts a higher percentage of identifiable melodies and lyrics than Kid A , but it's not exactly a potential crossover smash. Most of the songs are as chilly and slow-drifting as snow on the tundra; singer Thom Yorke is still prone to bouts of morose mumbling; and there isn't a single shout-along arena-rock chorus.

Industry pundits have already launched the attack, dubbing Amnesiac "Kid B-Minus." And while that's not fair, something is missing here: unity. While Kid A was made up of 10 discrete tracks, it sounded like a complete 45-minute statement. Amnesiac feels pieced together.

Three of the pieces are strikingly out of place. "Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors" features plenty of cool sounds, but no trace of a tune. "Hunting Bears" is an inconsequential doodle. And a remake of Kid A 's "Morning Bell" in 4/4 time (the original was in 5/4), though interesting, would've been better off as a B-side.

But three other pieces of Amnesiac rank with the band's best work. On "Pyramid Song," Phil Selway's languid drumming and Jonny Greenwood's sinuous string line merge behind Mr. Yorke's aching vocal, creating a sonic force that powers through the speakers like an ocean liner. "Knives Out," a cheery number about cannibalism, is also a welcome revival of the inventive three-guitar arrangements that used to be Radiohead's stock-in-trade. "Like Spinning Plates" is a swirl of backward samples and throbbing synths that builds to an almost operatic peak with a pained falsetto melody by Mr. Yorke that may be his finest performance on record.

The rest of the album is evocative, often thrilling, but it confirms that the band's decision last year not to issue a double album was the correct one. Several songs sound similar–at least in intent–to Kid A tracks.

It's funny how Radiohead has made such strenuous efforts to challenge both its audience and itself with each album, yet despite all the attempts to sound new and different, it's ended up sounding more and more like … Radiohead. They call that a style, and it's not a bad thing. Neither is Amnesiac . So don't believe the backlash.

–Mac Randall

Lucinda Williams: The Essence of Loss

The best singer-songwriter albums have been primarily born of unhappiness and loss: Joni Mitchell's Blue , Bob Dylan's Blood on the Tracks and, more recently, Lyle Lovett's Road to Ensenada and anything by Aimee Mann. In Lucinda Williams' case, a split with her bass-player boyfriend has inspired an amazing, raw, forlorn album. Essence (Lost Highway) is an empathic nursemaid for broken hearts from one of our premier songwriters.

As produced by guitarist (and sometime Dylan sideman) Charlie Sexton, Essence has a sparer, blues-pop shimmer than 1998's gold-selling, folk-rock-flavored Car Wheels on a Gravel Road. Though it can make for mellow background listening, her mournful vocals and keen, writerly lyrics pierce through. Ms. Williams seems wracked by fatalism and confusion. In "Are You Down," she says: "Can't put the rain back in the sky once it falls down / Nothin' will make me take you back"; in "Reason to Cry," she muses: "I guess I'll never know why something as good as this could flower up and die."

Ms. Williams, who will appear at Roseland on June 6, has a remarkable talent for crafting songs so finely honed they could be mistaken for classics. The waltz-like "I Envy the Wind" uses an almost childish directness to deliver erotically charged lyrics: "I envy the sun that brightens your summer / That warms your body / And holds you in her heat / And makes your days longer / And makes you hot / And makes you sweat." Even sexier is the title song, an R&B-flavored come-on asking for a dose of the "essence" of a lover she calls "my drug": "Shoot your love into my vein," she growls. But for all the confidence, there's a pleading tone: "Please come find me and help me get fucked up."

With Ms. Williams, what's unspoken can be just as powerful. "Bus to Baton Rouge" is a vivid catalog of items in her grandmother's house ("the dining room nobody ate at, the piano nobody played") and the metaphorical missed opportunities, disconnects and regrets. In one line, she engineers an amazing emotional reversal: In the middle of recalling "the sweet honeysuckle that grew all around," she suddenly reveals that they "were switches when we were bad." The pain of being whipped by honeysuckle–that's love in a nutshell, ain't it?

–David Handelman

Gram Parsons: High, Lonesome

When the casket of Gram Parsons burned to cinders in the Joshua Tree National Park in 1973, it fertilized the bloom of a million-and-one 70's stinkweeds. For not long afterward, the country-rock hybrid of which Mr. Parsons was a progenitor would turn radio into a cauldron of sentimental soft-rock goo. For every Willie Nelson who stretched out of the Nashville orthodoxy, there were five Eagles, three Olivia Newton-Johns and a Kenny Loggins.

Which is to say that Mr. Parsons mixed up some mighty strong medicine and we, the people, overdosed on what he wrought. Taken in a smaller portion, such as Sacred Hearts and Fallen Angels: The Gram Parsons Anthology (Rhino), one will–as Mr. Parsons' old group, the Byrds, put it–feel a whole lot better. Sacred takes up a year after Mr. Parsons had thrown over his Greenwich Village folkie influences, with the 1967 International Submarine Band album Safe at Home. There was certainly something in the air at the time, and what the 21-year-old Mr. Parsons was doing had its antecedents in Johnny Cash, Buck Owens and others, but rarely had a bunch of hippies sounded so reverential (musically) and so hairy (lyrically).

But no one heard Safe at Home . Mr. Parsons locked horns with his label owner, ornery kitsch visionary Lee Hazelwood, and the record sank. At issue was Mr. Parsons' leaving for the Byrds, a band he pretty much molded in his image for the one album he appears on, 1968's Sweetheart of the Rodeo. But Mr. Hazelwood legally barred his voice from most of it, and only since the exemplary recent CD reissue has one been able to hear the album as intended. Mr. Parsons' songwriting was growing considerably, as evidenced on "Hickory Wind," possibly his most famous composition. But more important was his knack for recontextualizing old country and soul tunes–such as the Louvin Brothers' "The Christian Life"–into countercultural dirges, swollen with expectation.

Soon, Mr. Parsons' reputation was just as engorged. By 1969, everyone from Kris Kristofferson to the Band to Kenny Rogers had picked up on his cue, though it was mostly subliminal next to Bob Dylan's just-released Nashville Skyline . Mr. Dylan had heard Mr. Parsons, of course, as had Keith Richards, who sought him out as a party buddy and would write "Wild Horses" for him (the definitive version is on Sacred ). So it comes as no surprise that Mr. Parsons was destined to O.D. at the age of 26. Musically, there were still plenty of high points–with the Flying Burrito Brothers, solo and in duet with Emmylou Harris (who has her own, more problematic two-disc set just out on Rhino)–but Mr. Parsons was pulling a Sly Stone, drinking and drugging himself into the jet set and out of the Burritos.

As with Mr. Stone, his music didn't really suffer, but after 1970, it didn't really grow, either. The songwriting receded, and the high points are his revisions of classics, such as "Love Hurts." He still had good songs in him, but nothing approaching the breathless purity of the unfortunately titled "Hot Burrito #1" and "Hot Burrito #2" from 1968.

This is written not as a caution against hedonistic abandon, but rather the sort of mindless talent-wasting that stems from a type of mid-level fame, burning yourself up as you find your music listened to but not heard. When Mr. Parsons sang "We're not afraid to ride / We're not afraid to die" in the song "Wheels," it was not with self-regarding bravado, but rather a matter-of-fact sadness that rarely rises to the top of the charts. Not that Billboard 's blessing is any reason music should be celebrated–as this box set will show.

–D. Strauss

Return of the Grievous Angel: A Tribute to Gram Parsons . Various artists. Almo Sounds.

Social Studies. Loudon Wainwright III. Hannibal Records.

Meat-and-potatoes rock-and-roll is officially in the ICU. Tom Petty's latest album peaked at No. 10 and plummeted; Springsteen and the Stones are touring as oldies acts; and John Mellencamp–that young, brash upstart–can be seen on a VH1 retrospective talking about his heart attack.

Interestingly, to fill the void, both NPR cognoscenti and the hoi polloi have turned to the same stopgap: country-folk-rock hybrid. For the NPR set, the mid-80's troika of Dwight Yoakam, K.D. Lang and Lyle Lovett made twanging acceptable; more recently Wilco, Whiskeytown and Lucinda Williams have delivered intimate versions of the grit and yearning that Nirvana isn't around to bang home.

In a parallel universe, the masses have made megamillionaires of Garth Brooks and Shania Twain, acts that seem to use focus groups to calibrate just how much corn to put in the recipe to sate both country and rock fans. (For the European remix of her latest album, Ms. Twain muffled the fiddles, suggesting her allegiance is less to Stetsons than to Benjamins.)

Though not that far apart musically, the two camps remain distinct. Occasionally, cult folkies like Suzanne Vega and Shawn Colvin fluke into hit singles, but ultimately it tarnishes their cachet among the esthetes, who stop listening to music that plays on supermarket sound systems.

These three recent compilations all fall into the nebulous alt.country-folk-rock category, with three very different backgrounds: a multiplatinum artist; someone whose sole hit was 25 years ago; and a tribute to a long-dead legend who never had a hit but whose stock has steadily risen.

Though usually classified as a country artist, Washington, D.C., native Mary Chapin Carpenter has always seemed more like a female Springsteen, a singer-songwriter who's a rock road warrior. In 1992, she wedded urban and rural on her fourth album, Come On, Come On (on which she covered Lucinda Williams' "Passionate Kisses") and sold 3 million copies. She didn't really become a household name, but Ms. Carpenter went on to play on Sesame Street , at the Super Bowl and for the troops in Bosnia–and unlike Shania Twain, she did it all without the benefit of any navel-baring videos. (Ms. Carpenter's looks are as refreshingly untweaked as her plain-spoken lyrics.)

But after Come On, Come On , Ms. Carpenter's albums weren't consistent; when I saw the song titles "Ideas Are Like Stars" and "What if We Went to Italy" on 1996's A Place in the World , I passed.

So it was refreshing to rediscover her on her new career retrospective, Party Doll and Other Favorites , which she aptly describes in the liner notes as "less about hit-driven careers and more about what happens musically between those moments on the charts." It's a showcase for her soulful, playful singing, her excellent songwriting and canny covers.

Party Doll collates studio versions of hits with live renditions, a soundtrack song, a wonderful original lullaby from a kids' album and a handful of new numbers. Ms. Carpenter proves herself equally capable of writing catchy line-dancing rave-ups ("I Feel Lucky," in which she joshingly imagines Mr. Lovett and Mr. Yoakam flirting with her), lyrically substantive rockers ("He Thinks He'll Keep Her," about a woman liberating herself from a bad marriage) and heart-rending ballads ("Stones in the Road").

Most impressive are her retoolings of her songbook. The opener, "Can't Take Love for Granted," from a performance on Late Show With David Letterman , rips off the roof; not remembering the original, I went back to the album it came from, Shooting Straight in the Dark , and heard a somber, almost colorless version. Ms. Carpenter does the reverse on her early "Quittin' Time"; slowing it down and paring back the instrumentation to just guitar and piano, she plumbs its deep beauty. Though she deserves as much success as Shania Twain, Ms. Carpenter's lucky that she never got so big that she became a joke; now that she's out of the glare of the spotlight, she deserves reconsideration by the hipoisie.

Gram Parsons has been a hipoisie darling for most of the 26 years since he died at the age of 26. Parsons, born Ingram Connor III, was an unlikely savior for country music–a trust-fund, Harvard dropout who decked himself out in custom-made embroidered rodeo suits. But he was the first to rediscover meaning and purpose in country and fuse it with rock-and-roll spirit, and every recording he made in his short career is worth owning: his landmark album with the Byrds, Sweetheart of the Rodeo , his subsequent splinter group the Flying Burrito Brothers, and his two solo albums, GP and Grievous Angel , and a live album.

But his fame is mostly through association. Parsons' plaintive vocals and personal songwriting inspired Keith Richards to write "Wild Horses" and strongly influenced the Eagles ("Desperado," not "The Long Run"). He discovered Emmylou Harris, who started out as his backup singer; U2 called its hit album The Joshua Tree because Parsons' remains were cremated at that national monument after his death from assorted controlled substances.

So he's the perfect artist for the tribute format–in fact, there's already been one mediocre tribute. But now his ex, Emmylou Harris, has supervised a better attempt, Return of the Grievous Angel , enlisting many who cite him as an influence, including Sheryl Crow, Beck, the Pretenders, Elvis Costello and the Cowboy Junkies. She also snared Flying Burrito Chris Hillman (dueting with Steve Earle) and Byrd David Crosby (dueting with Lucinda Williams), the Gen-X version of Parsons and herself (Evan Dando and Juliana Hatfield) and the aforementioned Wilco and Whiskeytown.

The best cuts don't stray very far from the originals–the album is carried more by the familiarity of the voices than any artistic achievement. Of the two radical rethinks, the Cowboy Junkies' "Oooh Las Vegas" is impressive–but, ultimately, it's just another Cowboy Junkies tune; and Wilco's rave-up of "One Hundred Years From Now" seems strained.

Some of the songs here aren't as good as covers previously recorded: Why not include Mr. Costello's version of "Hot Burrito #1 (I'm Your Toy)," from his Almost Blue , which blows away the Mavericks' overproduced faux-Roy Orbison version of the same song? Or Mr. Yoakam and Ms. Lang's "Sin City," which outstrips Beck and Emmylou's?

Reviewers' copies of the album came with a companion CD of Parsons' originals of the same cuts; I wish Almo Sounds had gotten permission to do the same with the commercial release, so newcomers could get past the celebrity aspect and hear the real thing.

It's hard to believe that when Parsons died, Loudon Wainwright III had already had a huge hit record, and yet here he is, a generation's worth of albums and touring later, and the hyperliterate acoustic troubadour is still playing one-night stands at the Bottom Line.

It's not fair; I recently listened to the re-release of his early album, Attempted Moustache , and realized that Mr. Wainwright is one of the few artists who has actually gotten better as he's gotten older. His voice has deepened and gotten more soulful (listen to his wonderful lead on Irving Berlin's "What'll I Do" from the recent family album, The McGarrigle Hour ) and his songwriting has gotten less gimmicky and more honed.

He's endured the misfortune of scoring a novelty hit with "Dead Skunk" in 1972, obscuring the depth of his best work; and, more recently, of being eclipsed by his son Rufus Wainwright, who was named "Best New Artist" last year by Rolling Stone . In the interim, Loudon has reliably cranked out countless cranky, catchy albums of amusement and torment.

His latest, Social Studies (Hannibal Records), runs the risk of being an entire album of novelties. These are songs ripped from the day's headlines originally written and performed for National Public Radio over the past 15 years. (Anybody remember Tonya Harding? Jesse Helms?) In almost anyone else's hands–though who else would even try this?–these songs would be the kind you'd listen to once and never again, like a comedy album.

But Mr. Wainwright is so remarkable a tunesmith and wordsmith that the songs outlive their subjects. I cringed at the thought of a song about O.J. Simpson at this late date, but his chorus won me over:

There's blood and mud and tears and gloves and coverage never stops

Experts, next door neighbors, sex and drugs and dogs and cops.

The NPR songs may not be as compelling as Mr. Wainwright's best navel-gazing work–about his multiple divorces and flings and midlife crises–but he's a deft observer of the world, whether it's on the aging of rock ("Gerry has a pacemaker …"), smokers congregating outside ("The new street people"), or waging war via CNN. On the prophetic "Inaugural Blues," written about the Clinton era, he wrote the line, "Hope we grow up before we're old."

Mr. Wainwright has made a blatant attempt to score Dead Skunk II with "Y2K," a sort of funked-up talking-folk song about computer doomsday. But musically, he's trying too hard to be hip, and lyrically he comes off too crotchety ("But we used to imagine, question and dream/ And now all of our answers come up on some screen") to achieve the ubiquity of, say, Baz Luhrmann's Internet-driven hit "Everybody's Free (to Wear Sunscreen)."

Though Mr. Wainwright's record label is pushing "Y2K" as a single, the only deejays I've heard play it are Meg Griffin on WFUV-FM and Vin Scelsa on his terrific Idiot's Delight show, Sunday nights on WNEW-FM.

No matter. I bet Rufus hopes he's doing this well when he's in his 50's.