If Not For You

Joey Feek

If you have tears, prepare to shed them—whether you’re a man in touch with his feelings (“Strong Enough to Cry”), a survivor of soured love (“Nothing to Remember”), or simply someone who hears in this immediately appealing country disc a potential that Feek’s death from cancer last year rendered unrealized. Recorded under her maiden name in 2005 and shelved thereupon by Sony, it finally sees the light thanks to Gaither Music. So what that men wrote most of the lyrics? Feek believed every tradition-affirming word.

Way Out West

Marty Stuart and His Fabulous Superlatives

Stuart didn’t compose this concept album’s attention-getting title cut (a cautionary tale about popping mystery pills from well-meaning pushers), but he and/or his band did compose the instrumental interludes, which firm up the music’s Western-mythos feel when they’re not extending it (into psychedelic surf rock, for instance). The strongest stand-alone song: “Time Don’t Wait,” a carpe diem rocker that might just have arisen from Stuart’s unwillingness to wait any longer for Roger McGuinn or Tom Petty to add another notch to their belts.

Live From The Fox Oakland

Tedeschi Trucks Band

Well, what do you know? The great double live rock album lives, replete with hyperextended song lengths (10 songs over seven minutes, half of those over 10) and lots of hot-miked crowd reaction. And just when the template-setting electric, blues-rock jams threaten to turn generic, an out-of-left-field cover (Leonard Cohen, Miles Davis, George Harrison’s Sgt. Pepper track) provides that little extra something, making you wonder what else the happily married couple after whom the band is named might have up its sleeve.

Let Them Fall In Love

CeCe Winans

In “Run to Him,” the commanding purity of Winans’ voice sublimates the song’s early-’60s girl-group roots to the point that you might overlook them altogether. Yet they’re as essential to the recording’s sparkle as Winans herself. The same holds for her sublimation of roots stemming from honky-tonks (Kris Kristofferson’s “Why Me”), hymnody (“Marvelous”), or Andraé Crouch (“He’s Never Failed Me Yet”). She does all right by rootlessness too. The mesmerizingly lovely melody of “Peace from God” may as well have floated in from the ether.

Encore

In 1996, Neil Diamond released In My Lifetime, a compilation stretched to three discs by demos, juvenilia, live recordings, and an overgenerous sampling of his then latter-day material. He has now released another one. 50th Anniversary Collection (UME/CMG) duplicates 39 of the previous box’s 76 tracks, excises the arcana (and, on “You Don’t Bring Me Flowers,” Barbra Streisand), clips Jonathan Livingston Seagull’s wings, and gives Diamond’s artistically fecund last 10 years indefensibly short shrift.

Being mainly cosmetic, these differences won’t tell the approximately 200,000 fans who bought In My Lifetime anything important that they don’t already know. What might is the 2002 three-disc collection, Play Me: The Complete Uni Studio Recordings … Plus! It documents the years during which Diamond, having shed his Brill Building skin, seemed bent on becoming a blend of Rod McKuen, Jimmy Webb, and Lee Hazelwood. Its restless weirdness makes it feel more alive, if less tuneful, than any repackaging of Diamond’s hits. —A.O.