Matraca Berg is a gifted songsmith whose own recordings generally trump the superstar versions that help her make her car payments (see also Patty Griffin, Lori McKenna). Her first LP in 14 years is haunted country music in an Emmylou Harris vein, shades darker than Berg’s past work: Family farms collapse, relationships cloud over, lovers ache and self-destruct. On "Silver and Glass," a post-mortem letter to a small town beauty gone Hollywood, plastic surgeons cut the desperate girl "like a paper doll." The melodies and hooks remain as irresistible as ever. Still, it's hard to imagine former client Martina McBride, for instance, singing lines like "I heard they finally did you in/Amphetamines and Vicodin" (although Kenny Chesney has already covered Berg's spooky "You and Tequila"). No matter: This is the sound of a writer who seems more concerned with making tradition her own than with who might follow her.

 Listen to "Racing The Angels":

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“Too Close”

Next was formed in Minneapolis when the uncle of Terry "T-Low" and Raphael "Tweety" Brown, who was a gospel choir director, introduced the brothers to Robert Lavelle "R.L." Huggar. Sounds of Blackness singer Ann Nesby groomed the R&B group before handing them over to Naughty by Nature's KayGee, who wrote and produced "Too Close." The idea for the song was sparked "from a conversation we had with several girls at a nightclub," explained T-Low. "It's talking about the club scene, with guys getting out of hand and the female telling him to back up, asking, 'What are you doing?'"