Love in the Midst of Mayhem by Joe Ely: Ely has said that he recorded this album to avoid “going completely batty” once the coronavirus lockdown hit Texas. And he didn’t waste time, releasing the soft copy in mid-April. The songs, however, gestated slowly, comprising as they did lyrics long in search of melodies and vice versa. (He began writing “Soon All Your Sorrows Be Gone” in 1972.) Given such provenance, it’s not surprising that they’re among Ely’s most difficult to pigeonhole.

“I feel like I have a good new friend.”

So says the slide guitarist Sonny Landreth of his relationship with Dion DiMucci, a connection resulting from Landreth’s playing on a cut from the Rock and Roll Hall of Famer’s new album, Blues With Friends.

“Choosing a song that lines up with a particular artist is really quite an intimate thing,” Landreth told me. “There has to be a chemistry, and I think Dion recognized that. I really dug the groove, and he was real happy with the results. I had fun.”

John Adams: Must the Devil Have All the Good Tunes? by Gustavo Dudamel, Yuja Wang, Los Angeles Philharmonic: Red herrings abound, starting with the title’s reference to “good tunes”—rhythms and dynamics are the obvious organizing factors—and extending to the first movements’ descriptors. However much the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the pianist Yuja Wang might shine in other contexts, they couldn’t bring off “gritty” or “funky” to save their lives.

Hank Williams is to country music what the Rolling Stones are to rock ’n’ roll—not its inventor but the artist who reforged the template, clearing away unnecessary accretions and engraving lean, clean lines that others, if they knew what was good for them, would follow for decades to come.

Across the Universe by Al Di Meola: None of these 14 Beatles tunes is the one after which the album is named. Yet the title fits if only because Di Meola, who plays everything but the brass, the violins, the tablas, the chak’chas, and the accordion, achieves gravity-defying flights of fancy not evoked by the titles of the songs that he does include. “Julia” and “Dear Prudence”? Too narrow. “Mother Nature’s Son” and “Strawberry Fields Forever”? Too earthbound. “Here Comes the Sun” and “I’ll Follow the Sun”? Too monadic.

Cardiovascular disease claimed the R&B singer-songwriter Bill Withers on March 30. He was 81.

Of the 29 singles that Withers released between 1967 and 1985, only six reached the Top 40. Four of those, however—“Ain’t No Sunshine,” “Lean on Me,” “Use Me,” and “Just the Two of Us”—left such an impression that even now their opening bars fan emotional flames.

What’s in a name?” asked Shakespeare’s Juliet. “That which we call a rose / By any other name would smell as sweet.” True enough in principle, the statement will provide little comfort to fans of Richard Marx who accidentally buy the new album by Richard Marks or fans of James Taylor who accidentally buy the new album by the James Taylor Quartet.

And vice versa.