Livin' and singin'

Even if Hillary Clinton doesn’t become president, the new albums from Bonnie Raitt, Mavis Staples, Loretta Lynn, and Lucinda Williams could justify calling 2016 the Year of the Woman.

Absorbed discretely, they capture veteran pros in full command of their skills. Absorbed as parts of a four-way conversation, they tackle and deepen pretty much every female-identified perspective that matters.

Bonnie Raitt’s album, Dig In Deep (Redwing), lives up to its title both aurally and verbally. Raitt and her band are so locked in on the up-tempo numbers that it’s hard to tell where the rock ’n’ roll ends and the R&B begins. Primary credit goes to her drummer (Ricky Fataar) and her organist (Mike Finnigan), both of whom—most notably on INXS’ “Need You Tonight” and Los Lobos’ “Shakin’ Shakin’ Shakes”—refurbish old stylistic tropes with subtly inventive touches.

The lyrics matter most on the sparse, quiet numbers, most of which articulate the working out of long-term romance with fear and trembling. But the most articulate is “The Ones We Couldn’t Be,” Raitt’s poignant response to the deaths of her mother (in 2004), her father (2005), and her brother (2009).

Least articulate is “The Comin’ Round Is Going Through,” a platitudinous expression of Occupy Wall Street–style Marxism that, notwithstanding its Joan Jett–worthy energy, misses the Big Picture.

Not that leftism is inherently oblivious. “MLK Song,” the most political song on Mavis Staples’ Livin’ on a High Note (ANTI/Epitaph), is a reminder that Martin Luther King Jr.’s Baptist gravity still occasionally tethers progressivism’s flightier fancies to reality.

Staples sings: “If I can do my duty as a Christian ought, / If I should sing salvation to the world He wrought, / If I can spread the message as the Master taught, / Then my living will not be in vain.”

Like Livin’ on a High Note’s 11 other selections, “MLK Song” was composed for Staples by one of her many admirers (M. Ward in this case), none of whom is particularly noted for his or her gospel inclinations. That each of them has tapped into the optimistic, gospel-protest vein Staples has mined for half a century—and that her producer, Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy, has shaped the parts into a soulful, rootsy whole—is a testament of the degree to which her living has not been in vain.

Providing a Republican counterpart to Raitt’s and Staples’ Democratic leanings is the Donald Trump–supporting Loretta Lynn, whose Full Circle (Legacy) does her estimable country music legacy proud.

Beginning with a new recording of the first song she ever wrote (“Whispering Sea”), concluding with a death-accepting Willie Nelson duet (Mark Marchetti’s “Lay Me Down”), and touching on old and new highlights in between, Lynn traces, with the assistance of producer John Carter Cash (Johnny’s son), an autobiographical parabolic arc. Its luminosity is mainly due to her amazingly undiminished voice.

“Undiminished” isn’t an adjective most people would use to describe Lucinda Williams’ voice. “Weathered” and “aching” are more like it. And on The Ghosts of Highway 20 (Thirty Tigers), her double-disc follow-up to 2014’s double-disc Down Where the Spirit Meets the Bone, her musical settings follow suit.

Thematically, Williams sees and raises Raitt, Staples, and Lynn at their most insightful. Religionwise, she outdoes all three.

“I know He’s gonna hear me knock, / And I know I’m gonna stand right / ‘Cause I’m standing on the rock,” she sings in “Faith and Grace.”

Williams’ voice makes such sentiments ring true.