North Americana

With iconic Americana guru T-Bone Burnett producing, The Secret Sisters (Laura and Lydia Rogers) showed up in 2011 with a self-titled album that answered the question, "What if Phil and Don Everly had been women and had released an awesome album of country music about 10 years before their 1950s heyday?"

For their follow-up three years later, the Rogers' sisters felt like expanding their pallette, both in terms of recording their own music as well as covers, and in advancing their sound so they didn't get pigeonholed as purely a retro act. Put Your Needle Down brings the same great harmonies heard in the debut, but this time allows them to roam into 1950s girl-group territory like their Brandi Carlisle co-written "Black and Blue" and  garage-band rock like their cover of P.J. Harvey's "Pocket Knife."

The sisters wrote more songs on Needle than they had on their debut, even receiving permission to finish out a Bob Dylan demo, "Dirty Lie," from Dylan himself. In their hands it gathers up some torchy, blues and jazzy elements that would have made it a great flip side to Peggy Lee's version of "Fever," setting it up as probably the album's best track.

Fans looking for more of the same as they heard in the debut album would have been pleased mostly by the very Everlyesque "Lonely Island" and disappointed by a lot of the rest of what they heard. The Rogers sisters were in just as fine a voice as they were in the first record but their desire to stretch themselves didn't amount to Secret Sisters Part 2 and may have put them outside of Burnett's sweet spot as a producer. Needle did not sell as well or garner the approval of the earlier record and led to the pair getting dropped by their label. Legal troubles added to their burden and they considered leaving music performing.

But eventually signed as an opening act by Carlile for a 2015 tour, the Rogers' found a muse again and would return to the studio for 2017's You Don't Own Me Anymore. This time produced by Carlile -- herself a wide-ranging synthesist of American music styles -- the album was a crowd-funding success that earned a Grammy nomination. A fourth album is due later this year.

Even if Needle didn't have the pitch-perfect recreation of the 1940s-era sound of their debut and was held down by a couple of songs that could have been better left for some more work, it's still a clear sign that The Secret Sisters and their music are worth blabbing about.

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When The Band wrapped up its career as a touring outfit in 1976, people probably envisioned several solo projects would commence forthwith. Between Rick Danko, Levon Helm, Robbie Robertson and Richard Manuel, at least, there lay the potential for a wide range of folk-influenced, meat-and-potatoes mid-tempo rock to spread throughout the charts in the next few years.

But that didn't happen -- what did happen was the group reforming in 1983 without Robertson, who himself didn't record anything new until a self-titled album in 1987. He explained the hiatus: "I wasn't so sure I had something to say." The desire to do music that both meant something to him and sounded different from what he had done with his former bandmates fueled the experimental nature of several of Robbie Robertson's tracks and his decision to work with Daniel Lanois as a producer.

Although it didn't wind up being a "concept album," Robertson's songwriting began with the concept of a mythical "Shadowland" parallel world that drifted alongside the real one, following the shadows left by clouds. It let him roam from writing "Fallen Angels," a tribute to his former bandmate Manuel, who had taken his own life in 1986, to the indictment of the ravenous culture fame machine, "American Roulette," to the lament of a Native American soldier damaged by his wartime experience in "Hell's Half-Acre."

Robertson's reflection on his Native American heritage helped build the lyrics to "Broken Arrow" -- one of the reasons it sounds better than the Rod Stewart remake even though Stewart's a better singer is because Robertson is exploring his own history though it. He approaches a warning about environmental issues in "Showdown in Big Sky" from the same perspective, mixing it with gospel and biblical imagery that will also swirl together in "Testimony." Lyrically, the most ambitious song is probably "Somewhere Down the Crazy River," a noirish memoir of a steamy nighttime encounter that alternates spoken-word segments with the titular chorus.

Sonically, Robertson travels from the hard rock of "American Roulette" and "Hell's Half Acre" to the anthemic "Sweet Fire of Love," and "Showdown" -- the former being an actual collaboration with U2. "Fallen Angel," featuring backing vocals from Peter Gabriel" and "Broken Arrow" are the most Lanois-ish songs of the album, heavy with synth atmosphere. "Crazy River," as befits its storyline motif, alternates between spare instrumentation behind the narration and its soundtrack-like chorus, backed by an echoing Sam Llanas of the BoDeans.

Having waited 11 years to be sure he had "something to say," and having spent three years and $750,000 crafting that something, Robertson showcases both how much of The Band's best work came from Robertson himself and how much his later experiences in moviemaking and movie music had influenced him. He may not have been as direct and focused as a solo artist as he had been when part of an ensemble, but the new vision and reflection spawned in the intervening time made for a fascinating new direction for one of rock music's most deep-thinking wordsmiths.