Four years after her final Mercury Nashville album, Life Goes On, a wiser, bloodied, but unbowed Terri Clark emerges on the The Long Way Home. This self-produced, self-released album is on her own Bare Tracks imprint, distributed by Capitol. Clark wrote or co-wrote every track on The Long Way Home, a rockin’ contemporary country record that sets its own standard for excellence, in her songwriting, in her production, and of course in her absolutely electric and soul-baring performance.       

      While Jeff Tweedy and Jay Farrar have had their share of differences since the acrimonious breakup of Uncle Tupelo, at least they now have one rather remarkable thing in common — they’ve both had the opportunity to collaborate with a noted American writer who happened to be dead. In 1998, Tweedy’s group Wilco joined forces with Billy Bragg on the album Mermaid Avenue, in which they set a handful of newly discovered poems by Woody Guthrie to music, and now Farrar and Benjamin Gibbard of Death Cab for Cutie have released One Fast Move or I’m Gone, a collection of songs created for a documentary film about the fabled Beat-era writer Jack Kerouac and the troubling circumstances that inspired his 1962 novel Big Sur.       

      After a glorious first season that earned the HBO show six Emmy nominations, Flight of the Conchords’ second run didn’t quite pack the same comedic punch. Some would say it was because the premise lost its luster, but it was mostly because the music just wasn’t as strong. Most of the songs in season one were pre-written and hashed out over years of stand-up, and for season two, Jemaine Clement and Bret McKenzie were in a time crunch: forced to write a dozen or so funny songs and ten episodes from scratch. Considering the circumstances, FOTC’s second Sub-Pop outing, I Told You I Was Freaky, has some worthwhile moments.       

      Precocious Brit Florence Welch fired a bullet into the head of the U.K. music scene in 2008 with the single “Kiss with a Fist,” a punk-infused, perfectly juvenile summer anthem that had critics wiping the names Lily Allen, Amy Winehouse, and Kate Nash from their vocabularies and replacing them with Florence and the Machine. While the comparisons were apt at the time, “Kiss with a Fist” turned out to be a red herring in the wake of the release of Lungs, one of the most musically mature and emotionally mesmerizing albums of 2009.       

      Retreating to generally quieter territory after the somewhat splashy It’s Not Big It’s Large, Lyle Lovett also backs away from original tunes on Natural Forces, choosing to devote the bulk of the 11-track album to other writers. Covers are common for Lovett, but not since 1998′s Step Inside This House has he spent so much time singing other’s songs, and he revisits some of the same composers as before, picking tunes from Townes Van Zandt and Vince Bell, while co-writing “It’s Rock and Roll” with Robert Earl Keen.       

      Based on title alone, it would seem that Southern Voice picks up on the harder country edges of Let It Go, but that’s not the case: this is Tim McGraw’s rockiest album yet, opening with a slow, spacy crawl called “Still” that would not be out of place on a record by a U2 knockoff and often revisiting that territory, taking the occasional detour to Nickelback territory on the Chad Kroeger co-written “It’s a Business Doing Pleasure with You.”       

      After Twilight became a world-wide hit, the film series based on Stephenie Meyer’s series of vampire romance books got a major upgrade. More time, effort, and money were poured into the second film, New Moon, and nowhere is this clearer than the film’s soundtrack. New Moon‘s music is darker, more sophisticated, and much more indie-friendly than its predecessor’s soundtrack, and features more of the artists Meyer credits for inspiring her writing.       

      Timothy B. Schmit launched his solo career late — in 1984, after the Eagles disbanded and right in the thick of the era of shiny, synthesized production. Schmit released three solo albums, all big and glossy, between 1984 and 1991, then reunited with the Eagles in 1994, so he never quite had a chance to record an album as relaxed and natural as 2009′s Expando. Ditching all the sheen, but not the professional panache, that lingered all the way to 2001′s Feed the Fire, Schmit returns to his country and folk-rock roots here, creating a record that has a clear through-line from his early days with Poco, bears echoes of early Crosby, Stills & Nash — a resemblance underscored by Graham Nash’s occasional guest harmonies and the howling harmonica on “A Good Day” — and clearly is the work of the soft rock songsmith behind “I Can’t Tell You Why.”       

      After successfully navigating his way into the mainstream with 2005′s epic Illinoise, ultra-prolific indie pop prince Sufjan Stevens had no intention of laying low. Instead, he released a set of Illinoise outtakes, a five-disc collection of Christmas songs, and staged a “symphonic and cinematic exploration of New York City’s infamous Brooklyn-Queens Expressway” that included a self-made Super 8 mm film, a full orchestra, and a small army of hula hoopers performing live in front of a sold-out Brooklyn Academy of Music. While it could be argued that the ambitious BQE serves as the “New York” chapter in his abandoned 50 states project, it hardly fits in with the other two entries.