Steve Wynn Returns: Former Dream Syndicate frontman/paisley underground enabler Steve Wynn has been on a roll lately, releasing a disc with the Baseball Project (his collaboration with Young Fresh Fellow Scott McCaughey and R.E.M.’s Peter Buck, among others) and joining with the Teenaged Prayers in a band called Hazel Motes (named, it’s a safe bet, for Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood heroine). But he also has a new disc out under his own name.

Crossing Dragon Bridge was recorded in Ljubljana, Slovenia (current home of Chris Eckman, co-founder of Seattle band the Walkabouts and the disc’s producer) and is Wynn’s first solo album in seven years. It’s almost certainly his best in fifteen years, if not ever. A spartan folk album with overlays of choirs, string sections and various effects, it’s echoey and hallucinatory and displaced-feeling, both kin to and totally unlike anything Wynn has ever done. “Love Me Anyway” sounds like it would have fit nicely on a “We Are All Made Of Stars”-era Moby album, while the weirdly jaunty, thickly looped “Wait Until You Get To Know Me” (”I’m a finger of Scotch/In a dry Manhattan/I’m a car wreck/That’s just waiting to happen”) reminds that Wynn is one of the finest, if one of the most frequently neglected, songwriters of his generation.

Five Reasons Why It’s OK to Like Taylor Swift (and One Reason Why Maybe It Isn’t):
1. She writes her own songs (pretty much). Does Carrie Underwood do that? No. No, she doesn’t.
2. She’s incapable of writing a song that isn’t catchy as hell.
3. She performed nicely alongside a waxen-looking Def Leppard on a recent episode of CMT’s Crossroads, while still managing to give the impression she had never heard of them before walking onstage. This is not easy.
4. She seems like a very nice person.
5. This song.

And yet: She probably doesn’t even know it, but Swift’s latest disc, Fearless, is a throwback to the Brenda Lee school of tears-on-my-pillow, what’s-a-girl-without-a-boy school of weak-kneed chick pop. Teenage girls, already forced to rely on Avril Lavigne and Pink for lessons in musical feminism, should proceed with caution, and a heavy dose of irony.

Van Morrison Revisits Astral Weeks: I once saw a Van Morrison show in Los Angeles, during which he refused to play many of his hits; this was his prerogative, and totally fine. However, he brought his backup singer onstage to sing them instead, while he stood there and nodded encouragingly. This was not fine. So he’s pretty much dead to me, but for those who still like that sort of thing, here are some photos from last weekend’s 40th-anniversary performance of Astral Weeks at the Hollywood Bowl. Apparently, the two shows marked the first time he’s ever performed the album in its entirety; as far as I’ve heard, he sang all the songs himself. A live CD and feature-film release from the shows is due early next year; here’s a clip:

Reissues We Can Get Behind, and Other Random, Possibly Relevant Things That Have Recently Happened: One of the best albums of the ’70s and one of the most smashing debuts ever, Warren Zevon’s eponymous Asylum debut, just got reissued by Rhino. (Factor in their recent Smiths and Replacements reissues/compilations, and the label is having a very, very, super good year.) The new iteration includes a second disc with fifteen demos and alternate takes, including a different version of “Desperados Under the Eaves”, a song that sums up southern California in the ’70s better than just about any other songs from that era (even those of Jackson Browne).

The three-disc box set Boots, Buckles And Spurs: 50 Songs Celebrate 50 Years Of Cowboy Tradition is being unofficially billed as the only collection of rodeo songs ever, which may be the case. It’s almost certainly the most comprehensive, with tracks ranging from the seriously rodeo-specific (Moe Bandy’s “Bandy the Rodeo Clown”, Chris LeDoux’s “Hooked On An 8 Second Ride”) to those that really don’t have anything to do with rodeos but seemed like a good idea to include anyway (Montgomery Gentry’s cover of Bon Jovi’s “Wanted Dead Or Alive”). Waylon Jennings shows up three times, most notably on “Let’s All Help the Cowboys (Sing the Blues)” – shown here in a different version, just because:

The Los Angeles-based Whispertown 2000 are the first outside act signed to Acony Records, the independent label of Gillian Welch & David Rawlings. That fact, and a much-circulated quote from friend and tourmate Jenny Lewis claiming that the band’s frontwoman, Morgan Nagler, “is my favorite songwriter, period,” has brought a fair amount of attention to the band’s recent debut disc, Swim. When they dabble in Carter Family-era country, the Whispertown 2000 mostly sound like one of those bands playing at being old-school as opposed to actually feeling it; but their folk-pop tracks are pure bliss.