Shades of Kristofferson showed up in “The Saddest Love That’s Ever Been Made” on 2009′s New Songs for the Old Frontier. On Mulligan one year later, “It’s a Long, Long Way” recalled Todd Snider’s “My Generation, Part II.” Sadly humorous character sketch “Tia Maria” (also on Mulligan) seemed torn from the shared notebook of John Prine and Blaze Foley.

I’ll bet you didn’t even know they shared a notebook.

You’ll find all of the above influences saluted on Ronnie Fauss’ latest collection, Any Lovin’ Way But Wrong, a covers EP that finds the Dallas singer-songwriter tackling “Clay Pigeons” (Foley), “Just the Other Side of Nowhere” (Kristofferson), “Happy to Be Here” (Snider), and “Sabu Visits the Twin Cities Alone” (Prine). If Fauss hadn’t already proven himself capable of writing original material of similar quality, this might seem a desperate and uninspired measure. But arriving at this particular moment – three solid EPs under his belt, the artist is preparing to kick things into a higher gear in the months ahead with work on his first full-length album – it’s more like he’s grounding himself in the work of some of his heroes, setting the bar against which we (and he) should judge his future output. The tightly-focused set of songs, and the way Fauss is able to quietly yet confidently make each his own, suggest that he has a solid idea of where he’s headed and all the talent it’ll take to get there. It’ll be our pleasure to watch it happen.

Samples from the new EP are below. At the moment, you can grab a free download of Mulligan at Ronnie Fauss’ website; I don’t know how long that deal will last, so you’re encouraged to act quickly if interested.

From the first few lines of self-penned album opener “All My Best Friends (Are Behind Bars),” it’s clear that Haigh is working in the same Texas honky tonk vein that produced ’90s stars Tracy Lawrence, Mark Chesnutt, and Tracy Byrd. Yet the breadth and quality of material on People Like Me suggest a seriousness and intent of purpose at odds with the pejorative connotations of the term “hat act.”

In fact, Justin Haigh is anything but just another hat act. Not just any schmuck in a Stetson is entrusted with top-shelf songs from Bobby Pinson, Kelley Lovelace, Erv Woolsey (George Strait’s longtime manager), Mary Gauthier, and Jamey Johnson on his sophomore album. Especially not without name recognition or major label backing. And not just any schmuck in a Stetson can do as much with such songs as Haigh does here.

While “All My Best Friends,” “Jack Daniels on Ice,” and “People Like Me” prove Haigh’s mettle with good-timing dance songs, “I Ain’t Leaving” (Mary Gauthier/Travis Meadows) and “Is It Still Cheating” (Jamey Johnson/Randy Houser/Jerrod Niemann) show him equally capable with uber-intelligent contemporary ballads and visceral Vern Gosdin-style heartbreak songs.

Waylon Jennings gets his due with a cover (a “Rose in Paradise” to equal the original) and title-centric tribute song, but the album is marked even more strongly by a different Texas singer-songwriter. Kevin Higgins, with whom I was not familiar before finding his name in the credits, contributes two of the album’s strongest tracks in “Monahans” and “In Jail,” both evocative story songs rich with dusty detail and sly humor. He wrote them, along with album closer “Gathering Dust,” solo. As a performer, Higgins fronts a Texas band called The Dust Devils. Here, he’s sort of the Billy Joe Shaver to Haigh’s neotrad Honky Tonk Heroes. If the album gets the attention it deserves, both men stand to benefit.

If smart traditional country with mainstream appeal is what you’re after, People Like Me does it better than any of the high-profile releases from Chris Young, Blake Shelton, or Ashton Shepherd due next week. I wouldn’t be surprised to see it show up on some Best of 2011 lists.

Artist Website | Amazon

Recorded at Nashville’s historic RCA Studio B with a band built around his Fabulous Superlatives, Ghost Train: The Studio B Sessions is ostensibly Marty Stuart’s love letter to traditional country music, but it also serves as a handy distillation of everything lovable about the artist himself.

After all, who else cedes precious album time to let legendary steel guitarist Ralph Mooney pick and slide his way through “Crazy Arms” more than a half-century after Ray Price made it a country standard? Or digs up, and reanimates (in rocking Marty Party fashion), forgotten gems like Don Reno’s “Country Boy Rock and Roll,” and Warner Mack’s “Bridge Washed Out”?

About the worst thing you can say about the Stuart originals that make up the rest of the album is that they’re better echoes of past classics than classic compositions in themselves. Yes, there’s a lot of Haggard in “Branded,” a lot of the Louvin Brothers in “Drifting Apart,” and a lot of Cash in “Hard Working Man.” Of course, the recitation “Porter Wagoner’s Grave” is positively haunted by the spirit of its namesake. But that’s sort of the point: Stuart is paying tribute. His affection is palpable, and the songs and performances (including a duet with Connie Smith!) are routinely excellent, if not classic.

While “Hangman” (cowritten with Johnny Cash just days before he died) is indisputably the showpiece, the rest is not that far behind. Altogether, Ghost Train is a rich, immensely rewarding collection that radiates love and affection for real country music. It’s up there with The Pilgrim as one of my favorite Marty Stuart albums.

Brennen Leigh is a young honky tonk songbird who has released a small handful of albums since migrating from Minnesota to Austin in 2002. Like Stuart, she doesn’t have the most distinctive of voices – she sounds very much like Miss Leslie and Melonie Cannon, for example – but she uses what she’s got to tremendous effect. While Ghost Train seems somewhat curatorial in its approach, The Box is wholly in the moment. It’s just that Brennen’s moment happens to be deeply informed by Emmylou Harris, George Jones, Melba Montgomery, and an unapologetic Louvin Brothers obsession.

Leigh’s grasp of tradition is deceptively organic. The first time through, I was sure I’d been beaten at the game of digging up obscure, heretofore unheard classics. “Big Horn Mountains” was obviously a bluegrass standard I’d somehow missed. “Hear My Little Bluebird Sing” was probably a dressed-up Carter Family track – why, why hadn’t I paid more attention to that Carter Family set? Then there was “Distracted,” first sung by… Patsy? Ella Fitzgerald? I even searched Google for the original Louvin Brothers version of “Are You Stringing Me Along,” which Leigh sings in beautiful close harmony with brother Seth Hulbert. Come to find out, there is no original Louvin Brothers version. That album highlight, like every other track here, is a modern composition. All but two of them were written or cowritten by the artist herself.

Judging from the ledger of live performances that is Youtube, this album has been years in the making: videos of these songs date back to at least 2008. That explains some of the ‘lived in’ quality of the performances, but not all of it. The rest, I suspect, can only be chalked up to talent and taste. Jim Lauderdale’s supporting appearance on the title track seems a ringing, and well-deserved, endorsement of both. (Lauderdale also appeared on the indie, and later Big Machine, debut of Leigh’s close friend Sunny Sweeney.)

An album that sounds this good musically, with songs of such uniformly high quality, is an impressive accomplishment by any standard – even more so for a relatively little-known act operating on what I can only imagine to be a relatively shoestring budget. Big labels and big money can polish (almost) anything to a likable sheen, but there’s a magic emanating from the heart of The Box that can’t be faked or easily replicated. Is it too early to call this one a classic? Pick up a copy for yourself and let me know. Here’s hoping some enterprising label sees fit to give it the wider release it deserves.

As a songwriter, though, her sensibility is firmly country. On “Just What I’m Looking For,” sung with Elizabeth Cook and Tim Carroll somewhere in the background, she’s feeling a little dangerous, throwing herself into the arms of a man she knows will probably be nothing but bad news in the long term. Meanwhile, title track “Under the Rushes” is a classic story song about emergent womanhood, delivered with strength and clarity from an omniscient distance. The album’s most country moment, though, is “Makin’ Love,” on which a duet vocal from Chuck Mead proves a nice but ultimately unnecessary bonus: Beasley could just as easily have carried the song on the strength of her own performance.

Whether Under the Rushes has any impact with the general audience or not, it should be on the radar of the Nashville recording community, if only so they can pillage it for wildly successful cover versions as they do (or once did) with new releases from Bruce Robison and Radney Foster. At her best, Beasley is that caliber of writer. Here Nashville, I’ll do some of the work for you: resilient Texas rocker “Heart Like a Wound” belongs on Miranda Lambert’s next album, and “The Little Things” is a classic Pam Tillis torch song. Oh, and if Beasley doesn’t have a hit with the title track, some other Americana chanteuse probably could.

An indie album on which I can recommend at least half the tracks is a rarity, so you can bet that checking out Beasley’s previous album, Good Samaritan, just got added to my musical to-do list.

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Opening tracks “Another Bender Might Break Me” and “Gettin’ High and Hittin’ New Lows” set the tone for the record, both in terms of Virgil’s knack for fresh turns of phrase and the pervasive subject matter (there’s more Oxycontin here than in DrunkenMartina’s dressing room).

Drug references are everywhere. Concern for a friend with “One Way Track Marks” on his arm (read: a nasty heroin habit) doesn’t slow the singer’s own descent into a lifestyle that he himself understands to be a “Slow Suicide.” Even poverty and love are figured in terms of drugs: being broke isn’t so bad until you’re “Too Broke to Overdose,” and the closest we get to a love song is a walking-impaired drunk’s somehow sweet plea to “Be My Crutch.”

And yet, it all sounds like a party – guitars and drums for muscle, banjos rolling through like hellfire, steel licks showing up at all the right times, Virgil’s pliable whiskey-and-gravel croon always exactly where it needs to be. It’s a legitimately fun and rewarding listen if you don’t mind the, er, topical homogeneity.

“Hank Williams Records” finds a man in hot water for blaring Hank Williams to cure his lovesick ills:

That landlord knocked upon my door
And said “Son, we’ve had a complaint”
I told that landlord and all the other tenants
They could f**k off if they don’t like Hank

There’s more at stake than music preferences, or competing notions of appropriate listening volume. This guy’s heartbroke and healing himself the best way he knows how, which happens to involve drinking himself into a hole and blaring Hank. To Virgil’s credit, he never loses sight of the hurt undergirding the self-destructive choices, even as the album as a whole does sort of come across as one long, celebratory downward spiral.

Beneath all the booze and swagger lies a wordsmith. Virgil characterizes the partners in the dysfunctional relationship of “Either Way We’re F**ked” as “mutual parasites,” bristles at being treated as “nothing but debris” on “In the Gutter Again,” and elsewhere manages what could very well be the first seamless integration of the word “sclerose” into a country song. He’s an exceptionally clever writer.

It’s to Hellbound Glory’s eternal credit that, when they do finally wrap up with a cover of “I’m a Long Gone Daddy” by (who else?) Hank Williams, it doesn’t stand out as any sort of departure from what they’ve been doing the whole rest of the time. It may be blasphemy to say so, but it sounds like it could even be a Virgil original.

Recommended if you like: Hank III, J.B. Beverley & the Wayward Drifters, Oxycontin.

Download the album now from Amazon MP3

(I think he may still harbor some ill feelings about being passed up as Richie’s replacement.)

Bundy earns every bit of the ‘country Norah Jones’ description she’s been selling on sultry opener “Drop On By,” but that’s actually among the less country songs here. Perhaps not coincidentally, it’s also the only one the singer didn’t have a hand in writing.

“Cigarette” and “Curse the Bed” fall more squarely in the country heartbreak ballad mold, with the singer trying to figure out how to move on in the wake of broken relationships. Bundy writes and delivers these songs with such cool confidence that it’s easy to overlook the fact that what she’s doing here is actually pretty difficult – Kellie Pickler has been missing these marks for years. Bundy sounds so sure of herself, right out of the gate, that she very nearly leapfrogs her own generation of country bombshells: the solo-penned “Homecoming Queen” sounds like a lost Lorrie Morgan hit, with a vocal performance to match.

The wailing of “Please,” on which Bundy pleads for a second chance after crossing over love’s cheating line, only serves to highlight the relative restraint of the other five tracks. Barring the total “Stay” treatment, where the only instrument is a guitar strummed by a baked bean heir in a dorky hat, this is about as stripped down as mainstream country gets. It’s all the more surprising for having been produced by Swift chum Nathan Chapman.

The EP concludes with what is, in somewhat peculiar fashion, probably its most broken, and most telling, track. “When It All Goes South” finds Bundy unable to enjoy a relationship even when it’s going right – she’s already regretting putting herself in such a vulnerable position and bracing for the eventual nosedive, with a pessimist’s (or is it just a realist’s?) understanding that good things never last.

And they don’t.

Because Achin’ isn’t actually presented as an EP: it’s immediately followed by a second half, Shakin’, which kicks off with lead single “Giddy On Up.” Fans of that single’s over-the-top, theatrical style (think Dolly at her campiest) will likely get a kick out of the second half, but there isn’t much here for the rest of us. Even in terms of passable guilty pleasures, “Giddy On Up” is the best Shakin’ has to offer.

But there’s an enormous amount of promise in the first half. If Laura Bell Bundy can find some way of balancing her slow-burning numbers without going quite so big and dumb on the others, her next full-length collection may be a great album rather than just a great EP.

Download the whole album today for $5.99 (Amazon MP3)
Or buy the first six tracks whenever you want for $5.94. $4.95 if you skip “Please.”