“Tubes,” Potter reports, when I ask after the splendid, yet weirdly melodic, racket. “We tracked down these plastic PVC things. We just pulled into the hotel, and the guys are jamming out on these rainbow-colored plastic tubes.”

“Jamming out” works, I guess, although from my end it sounds a little like a rugby scrum between several Blue Man Groups. “I don’t think the hotel’s gonna let us in,” she says, cracking up.

Such things appear to happen, more or less, all the time with this bunch. Though it’s a difficult thing to prove, Potter is very probably the music world’s most gregarious and engaging 24-year-old soul-blues singer/Hammond B3 operator/Janis Joplin disciple. From their current spot in a hotel parking lot in Madison, Wisconsin, they sound like the band you want to be in if you ever wanted to be in a band. “There are people coming into the hotel right now,” Potter says. “And our drummer has gone into banging on the rain pipes.”

There are many reasons for the Nocturnals’ growing appeal. The first is Potter; she’s sweet and funny, curses regularly, and calls exactly on time, which, in the music-journalism world, is improbable bordering on miraculous. The second is the band’s New England history. For all their swampy soul, the Nocturnals — Potter, guitarist Scott Tournet, bassist Bryan Dondero, and drummer Matt Burr — are based in Vermont, and formed in northern New York at St. Lawrence University, an area notoriously friendly to jam bands.

They convened regularly to do what music folk do when it’s prohibitively cold: plunder local music stores and sit around and play records. Potter found herself initially into Joni Mitchell and Patty Griffin (”total chick music,” she says), but soon found that her heart was in something a little meatier, a little more soulful.

The third reason is their crossover appeal. The Nocturnals self-released their first two records, Original Soul and Nothing But The Water (the latter of which was given a spiffed-up re-release by Hollywood Records in 2006) and spent a few years engaged in a touring fiesta that would find them in front of indies and hippies at blues festivals, jam-band soirees, and whatever opening slots came their way.

Shows would generally end with Potter leaving her B3 for a neck-hair-raising a cappella version of “Nothing But The Water” and frequently featured the band’s fire-breathing take on “Mystery Train” (both are on YouTube). All of which contributed to the band’s well-won reputation as a live monster. “We have this notion of being a cute, rootsy band from Vermont,” Potter says, “which is so not what we are anymore.”

“It’s a really weird position right now,” said guitarist Tournet. “We feel like we can’t really be a spokesmodel for what’s going on. We’ve made it onto this label, and they’ve been damn cool, but until now we’ve done the grass-roots indie thing. So we’re deeply in both worlds, which has been interesting.”

In August, they released (on Hollywood) their third record, This Is Somewhere, produced with Whiskeytown alumnus Mike Daly. It’s a poppier, smoother record than its predecessor, but one not frightened of crawling around some dark places, including infidelity (”Lose Some Time”), the drowning of New Orleans (”Ain’t No Time”) and the dicey state of American politics (”Mr. Columbus” and “Ah Mary”).

“It’s not some hip trend to write an anti-war album anymore,” Potter said, “It’s a fucking crisis. That’s why I’m writing songs like that. That’s what we’re dealing with.”

Dark topics aside, Potter and the band are relishing having new songs to break out on tour. “It’s like having a new brood of children,” Potter says. “The older ones grow up and go off to college, and you make some more babies.”

Bassist Dondero said the band suffers from a case of “musical ADD. We get a little tired of playing the same thing, but we allow our songs to change pretty quickly out on the road. Scott and I come from a highly improv background, and Matt and Grace are always interested in stretching things out. It keeps things interesting.”

The hard part, the band agrees, is the recording process. “Oh, it’s horrible!” Potter says with a mighty laugh. “I’m not going to lie and say, ‘It was a really wonderful growing experience…that is bullshit. It’s fucking hard.”

Potter does not say this last part in a way that startles you; it more makes you want to get her a beer. “It’s just not who we are,” she goes on. “It’s easy to sort of forget you’re a road band and get into the studio thing, but coming back out is a clear indication that we’re just kidding ourselves, that we could ever do anything half as good as we do live. This is the phase when you can go watch people’s faces as they experience the new songs for the first time, and seeing their faces, whatever they face they make, that’s an instant result. I love that.”

On record, Reilly paints himself as a vaguely self-destructive smartass who can’t entirely bury his meltable heart. He’s Philip Marlowe in rock form, his words tumbling out as melodic beat poetry in “Subterranean Homesick Blues”-style clusters (hence hipster-literate song titles such as “Bugsy Salcido Has Fled The Desert”).

He makes sing-songy, pub-anthem melody the order of the day here, using it as a canvas on which to paint stories of loners and losers. “You’re So Plain” is a tale of lost love made more powerful by its everydayness, and “Valentine’s Day In Juarez” is a dark travel journal with an agreeable hallucinogen-themed chorus that would get stuck in a toddler’s head. But Reilly’s most powerful trick is playing it straight. There couldn’t be less snark in “Broken Parakeet Blues”, a severe-sounding tribute to a soldier heading into the sands.

Born over the past four years in Muscle Shoals, Sirens Of The Ditch has moments that will sound satisfyingly familiar to Isbell’s Trucker fans, especially “Brand New Kind Of Actress”, which finds the 28-year-old pushing his deceptively warm-hearted tenor down well-traveled, narrative roads. But the album is flavored more with hooks and power-pop seasonings than DBT’s meaty southern fare; co-produced by Isbell and Hood, it’s among the most polished-sounding things to feature Trucker names on its jacket.

“Grown” is all heartland jangle, “Down In A Hole” is a humid, swamp-rat detour, and “Chicago Promenade” jumps well north from Isbell’s traditional geographic stomping grounds, with a mournful piano to boot. The brilliant “Dress Blues” is sold out by a much stronger version making the rounds online; in it, Isbell delivers his eulogy with a brutal starkness, while the album version sports country bells and whistles that come off as distracting.

The split is now claimed by all parties to be amicable, which seems borne out by the fact that several Truckers appear here: Hood, bassist Shonna Tucker (Isbell’s wife), and John Neff, who has more or less replaced Isbell in the band. Some DBT fans may be put off by the poppier-than-expected sound, but Sirens Of The Ditch leaves no doubt that the junior senator is fully invested in his run for higher office.

Jesse Malin and Springsteen are longtime mutual admirers, and on Glitter In The Gutter, Malin indulges his inner Boss more than ever — not necessarily via the music, which is uncorked with often soaring effervescence, but in the scenes he sets on such songs as “Black-Haired Girl” and “Prisoners In Paradise”. It’s telling that when Bruce himself turns up, he’s called on to add emotional punch to a heartsick lament about a lost couple and a “Broken Radio”.

Springsteen is only the top of a stuffed cast of guests here; Ludacris albums don’t have this many cameos. Ryan Adams lends frequent guitar and vocals, Jakob Dylan brings his rasp, Josh Homme and a Foo Fighter stop in.

Malin aims to make a message with the VIP list, but that message is better delivered in well-built songs such as “In The Modern World” and “Aftermath”, wide-open, fist-in-air trips of flight and youth, of the short-term thrills and long-term devilry of consciously, gleefully abandoned inhibitions. And if you’ve missed that by track 10, Malin throws in a cover of the Replacements’ “Bastards Of Young” to bring you home. American rock may be fractured, but its images are as iconic as ever, and Malin knows just how to serve them up.

Such goodwill benefits Grushecky throughout A Good Life, a double-cheeseburger of a disc that enjoys a lack of pretensions so pervasive you almost wonder if it’s being ironic. The title track and the Stones-ish “Nothing With You” veer close to Hootie territory, but Grushecky probably doesn’t consider that a bad thing. “Is She The One” is a harmonica-kissed janglefest, “Party Tonight” is about…a party tonight, and there’s a fathers-and-sons number called, well, “Father And Son”.

Speaking of fathers, longtime mentor Springsteen steps in with occasional help, most effectively on the opening rocker “Code Of Silence”. Whenever the Boss comes around, Grushecky steps his game up, probably an innate psychological response. Still, with Springsteen gone ragtime, John Mellencamp gone political and Bon Jovi and Bob Seger gone country, there’s a gaping hole in such meat-and-taters rock, and Grushecky’s trying to fill it as earnestly as he, or probably anyone, can.

The Letting Go is a welcome left turn for Billy, one of the myriad aliases of the prolific and hirsute Will Oldham. His vocals barely step out from behind the curtain of his mist-covered, dusky soundscapes — all droning guitar and sneaky melody with occasional visits by a string section, given lovely counterpoint throughout by Faun Fables vocalist Dawn McCarthy.

It’s hard not to be moved by Oldham’s raw fragility. “Hey little bird, thank you for not letting go of me, when I let go of you,” he sings on the title track. “Big Friday” is a letter of plaintive gorgeousness, almost as pretty as “Lay And Love”, which applies a whisper of electronic loopery to his swooning: “When you walk in, things go luminous.”

This is not to say The Letting Go is all fragile heart-on-sleeveness. “Strange Form Of Life” works up a near-groove, and “Cold & Wet” and the dissonant “The Seedling” are both growly blues. But the sweeping “Cursed Sleep” best illustrates the record’s restful themes — Oldham spends a lot of time sleeping and laying down, more or less gushing about a tantalizingly close and peaceful love: “This is what it should be, to have such a woman with me.” Though his trembling voice seems at least to hint at the troubles that eventually grow attached to such things, there’s a disarmingly endearing sense that he’s found great sweetness in it all.

But the smartly off-kilter Windy City son — who was slated to sing at Game 1 of the Cubs’ 1984 playoffs but succumbed to leukemia just eleven days beforehand — has seen his influence remain lively, as this tribute assembled by Goodman’s daughter Rosanna attests.

Highlights include Matt Keating & Emily Spray swaying through the heartbreakingly pretty “Danger”, and Luther Wright & the Wrongs’ nutball novelty take on the requisite “City Of New Orleans”, now a part eulogy in any context. Also featured are coffeehouse up-and-comers such as Ana Egge (”Old Fashioned”), Chris Brown (the lovely “Yellow Coat”) and Kate Fenner (”I Just Keep Falling In Love”); they lend the disc a nicely reverent, low-key tone.

Rosanna Goodman contributes — what else — “My Old Man”, but her greater gift lies in helping keep her dad’s music fresh and vital. Even if his baseball team isn’t.

Potter and her Nocturnals — guitarist Scott Tournet, drummer Matthew Burr, and bassist Bryan Dondero — met in a northerly and remote corner of New York but their sweetly humid vibe is more suited to the southeastern swamplands. At 22, singer/pianist/organ player Potter is probably too green to have personally endured all the blues-approved hardships she recounts on songs such as “Joey”, about an abusive parolee. But she pulls off an engaging simulation by launching herself into meaty tracks such as “Treat Me Right” with a youthful, windows-down abandon (”Get out of my way or I’ll start blasting ‘Cat Scratch Fever’,” she warns in “Toothbrush And My Table”).

Potter is a few parts Patty Griffin or Joni, but prays mostly at the altar of Bonnie Raitt and Janis, and she’s got skills on the Hammond B-3, which adds plenty of sonic warmth to her blues-rock songs. The band is still feeling its way around, and production-wise Nothing But The Water could use some more air, but Potter provides plenty of fire.

For almost a decade now, the Drive-By Truckers have written their songs anywhere and everywhere, mostly because that’s what their schedule has commanded. Songs are born aboard vans, at soundchecks, in darkened studios after everyone’s locked up for the night. Last summer, during sessions for the Truckers’ seventh album, Mike Cooley even wrote one while strolling through a field somewhere in North Carolina.

Sure, that’s a romanticized notion — songwriter communes with nature, finds muse — but there’s testimony from credible sources. “I’m just out having a cigarette,” recalls drummer Brad Morgan, “and I look and there’s Cooley out there in the field, walking around with an acoustic guitar. I thought, ‘Wish I had a camera for that.’”

Bassist Shonna Tucker saw it too, wondering all the while what the hell was going on. “But he came back [to the studio], grabbed a guitar and started playing ‘Gravity’s Gone,’” she relates. “We were like, ‘All right,’ and recorded it that day.”

And so it goes, another song in the life of one of the best bands in America. “Gravity’s Gone” ended up as the second track on A Blessing And A Curse, released April 18 on New West Records. The Truckers’ seventh album is leaner and meaner than its predecessors but hasn’t suffered any corresponding loss of muscle mass. As usual, its songs were contributed by the band’s three writers, singers and guitarists: Patterson Hood, Jason Isbell, and Cooley — who, incidentally, wants absolutely nothing to do with any of this roving-the-wilderness stuff.

“Well, I was probably wandering around the field,” he admits, in a speaking voice not far from what Darth Vader might have sounded like if the Galactic Empire were based in northwestern Georgia. “But I don’t know what I was thinking about.”

Which is true enough to form. Ask about the creation of the new record, the secluded North Carolina studio where it was recorded, the effect of a small army of babies on the songwriting, or the fundamental differences between laying down an album in Carolina vs. their Athens, Georgia, base or their spiritual home of Muscle Shoals, Alabama, and the answers all seem to be that no one really beats themselves up thinking about it all that much. “As far as the band and the development of it, I’ve always left it alone,” said Cooley. “I’m not gonna change that now.”

But a number of changes did happen during the year or so that produced A Blessing And A Curse, including a few of the big, life-changing and frequently drooling variety. To borrow a line from Cooley, he and Hood both “multiplied” — Cooley had a son, his second, and Hood had his first daughter.

“She sings along to records all the time,” Hood says, adopting a sweet, fatherly tone. “If the music stops, she wants to know why.”

“Seeing those guys really getting into the family mode is great,” adds Morgan. “You can hear it in the writing.”

There’s more. Isbell and Tucker, who married in 2003, bought their first house together in Alabama. Hood and Isbell stayed busy with solo tours and side projects. Last August, Cooley and Hood marked twenty years of playing together — in true Trucker fashion, on the clock. “All we did was acknowledge it for out homecoming shows, and that was pretty much the extent of it,” said Hood.

The band initially planned to take 2005 off, as their professional world had finally stopped spinning enough to allow for such a thing. “There was some road burnout in there,” Cooley admitted. But it didn’t take long for the wheels to roll again. As gifted as they are when it comes to songwriting and performing, the Drive-By Truckers are spectacularly lousy vacationers.