They Write the Songs

The focus is on singer-songwriters--from veterans Bob Dylan and Steve Earle to newcomer Matthew Ryan--in this edition of Calendar’s guide to keeping up with what’s exciting in pop on a budget of $50 a month.

OCTOBER

Bjork, “Homogenic,” Elektra. Ever since her Sugarcubes days, Bjork has been such an adorable, pixie-like presence on the pop scene that it has been easy to think of her as simply a winsome eccentric. No longer. In her most assured and ambitious outing, this singer, songwriter and producer draws upon exotic musical touches from a variety of sources--from the arty edge of electronic dance music to the Icelandic String Octet--to frame these reflections on love and need with just the right backdrop of mystery and wonder.

Bob Dylan, “Time Out of Mind,” Columbia. Despite some inexplicable filler, this is not only the best Dylan album in two decades, but also a work so rich and convincing that it lives up to Dylan’s own impossibly high songwriting standards from the 1960s. Where Dylan once captured the idealism and independence of a generation on the march, he now looks out at his generation and world much further down the line, in a time when there are fewer options--”It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there,” he sings in this frequently brilliant album.

Portishead, “Portishead,” Go! Beat/London. There are other rewarding moments in the second album by this British trip-hop outfit, but don’t be surprised if you keep going back to “All Mine,” a love song that takes on deeper and more sinister shadings each time you hear it. Ultimately, it’s Beth Gibbons’ vocal (which moves from Billie Holiday ease to Sinead O’Connor assault) that defines the song’s underlying sense of desperate obsession.

NOVEMBER

Steve Earle, “El Corazon,” Warner Bros. The superb Nashville singer-songwriter comes back with two more songs that nearly equal the punch of last year’s “Ellis Unit One.” “Christmas in Washington” is a moving lament about the lack of political heroes today that evokes the spirits of Woody Guthrie and labor martyr Joe Hill, while “Ft. Worth Blues” is a melancholy look at restlessness and depression that was inspired by another great singer-songwriter, the late Townes Van Zandt.

Janet Jackson, “The Velvet Rope,” Virgin. The theme here is the ways social and psychological forces separate us and make us all feel as if we are on the wrong side of the velvet rope in some area of our life. But don’t feel guilty if you lose track of the plot and just fall under the spell of all the pop and hip-hop delights that Jackson and co-producers Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis have given us.

Matthew Ryan, “May Day,” A&M.; There are moments in “May Day” when this 25-year-old from working-class Pennsylvania makes you think fondly of the young Bruce Springsteen and Paul Westerberg and their searches for self-worth. There’s more of the softer, singer-songwriter side of Springsteen than the rock ‘n’ roll energy of “Born to Run” and beyond, but you sense in the bite of the vocals and the detail of the lyrics that Ryan has spent time in the darkness on the edge of his own town--at least some of it, the music suggests, with Westerberg and the Replacements on the stereo.