Before she became the omnipresent babe at grizzled-rock-star reunions, Sheryl Crow was a Missouri gal with a big voice, a mutable country-rock countenance and a lust for pop hooks. The loping "Leaving Las Vegas" launched her eclectic Grammy-sweeping 1993 debut, which also had L.A. folk funk, piano-bar blues, even a Dylan-cum-R.E.M. "rap" ("The Na-Na Song"). The bonus disc doesn't exhume her never-released 1992 album (try the Internet), but it has worthy takes on Eric Carmen's 1975 power ballad...

Call Leona Lewis a diva of the old-fashioned variety: a singer who uses her rafter-rattling voice to dramatize female suffering. On her second album, the U.K. belter delivers synth arrangements that arc skyward, toward Simon Cowell's mountaintop redoubt. Lewis is technically flawless, but behind lyrics about "the scars on my heart," there's little personality — you miss a little of Mariah and Whitney's supersize ego.

Forty-four years after the Beatles first played Shea Stadium, Paul McCartney returned to Queens to play the first concert at Citi Field. With an exceptionally well-preserved voice, Macca plows through Beatles and Wings hits, plus solo gems. This is McCartney's sixth live album since 1990 — most with a nearly identical version of "Hey Jude" and "Live and Let Die." Skip to a blazing version of "Day Tripper," which hadn't been touched since the 1960s. Best is "A Day in the Life," featur...

Recorded largely in Nashville's famed RCA Studio B, Dave Rawlings' solo bow is as rooted in old-timey verisimilitude as his work with Gillian Welch. His tenor and understated acoustic-guitar work carry songs like "Ruby," which packs a Seventies Topanga Canyon vibe. The head-turners are the unplugged "To Be Young (Is to Be Sad, Is to Be High)," written with Ryan Adams, and Conor Oberst's "Method Acting": songcraft as soul-baringly timeless as Twenties Delta blues.

When you've sold 36 million albums, you can afford to reinvent yourself endlessly. But Norah Jones' blessing, or curse, is how she remains her imperturbably chill self in any of her guises, be it hip-hop soul diva (Q-Tip's "Life Is Better") or jilted lover drifting through an art film (My Blueberry Nights). For her fourth LP, her liveliest, she rolls with producer Jacquire King (Tom Waits, Modest Mouse) and hires feisty session men, including guitarist Marc Ribot and drummer Joey Waronker....

Snow Patrol found a wide audience as a kind of Coldplay minus the world-conquering aspiration. The Irish lite rockers' glistening atmospherics and genteel grandiosity made sweeping melancholy feel fragile and private. This two-CD best-of draws mostly from the three albums they've made since 2004, when singer-guitarist Gary Lightbody jettisoned his low-fi Belle and Sebastian side on the austerely gushing Final Straw. Lightbody sums up his worldview on Snow Patrol's biggest hit, "Chasing Cars":...