Sorry You Couldn’t Make It by Swamp Dogg: Technically, the version of Johnny Paycheck’s “She’s All I Got” on this part-country, part-soul, part-country-soul follow-up to 2018’s all-Auto-Tuned Love, Loss, and Auto-Tune isn’t a cover. Why? Because Swamp Dogg (under his real name, Jerry Williams Jr.) co-wrote it about 40 years ago, right around the time that he was springing his out-of-the-box soul-man routine on an unsuspecting public. That that public never paid much attention says more about it than it does about Williams.

Not Now, Bernard and Other Stories by Alexander Armstrong, Orchestra of the Swan: Not Now, Bernard and ­Isabel’s Noisy Tummy are illustrated children’s books by David McKee that add a comic gloss to discomfiting childhood experiences. James Mayhew’s The Knight Who Took All Day adds amusingly quixotic, mildly PC kinks to a damsel-in-distress plot. And “Annabel Lee” is the Poe poem. Then there’s Thread!, a stroll through the Bayeux Tapestry.

According to the mini-biography on his website, the singer-songwriter Tyson Motsenbocker experienced a “renegotiated relationship with God” seven years ago while on a monthlong, 600-mile walk that he undertook to deal with the death of his mother. 

Now, two EPs and two full-length albums later, that renegotiated relationship and a profound sense of loss continue to mark the boundaries within which his cinematically vivid musical vignettes unfold.

Changes by Justin Bieber: This musically slight, blue-eyed R&B will be of primary interest to those who care about Justin Bieber—his ups, his downs, his marriage, his faith. To this end, the lyrics paint a fairly encouraging picture. Only three of the 16 songs contain anything lewd or crude, and in two of those cases it’s guest rappers doing the offending. Of course, it was Bieber who did the inviting.

New releases by the jazz double bassist Adam Booker, the late organist McNeil Robinson, and the Moscow Synodal Choir and Russian National Orchestra mark the arrival of what’s shaping up to be an inspiring and unusually diverse soundtrack to the Easter season. 

Early Work, Volume 1: 2002-2005 by Josh Garrels: During the last decade, Garrels has emerged as one of Christendom’s most consistent singer-songwriters, developing a folk-based approach to musical faith mining that has grown more ornate with each release while remaining tethered to his acoustic guitar and dark tenor voice, the upper range of which would endear him to Joan Armatrading fans should they ever lend him an ear.

In the Vivaldi episode of his PBS Great Performances series Now Hear This, the violinist-conductor Scott Yoo describes The Four Seasons, Antonio Vivaldi’s most famous composition, as the embodiment of the composer’s “two opposing musical passions, the Church [Vivaldi was a Catholic priest] and the opera, brought together with his virtuosity.”

“It’s a sacred instrumental opera,” Yoo concludes, “with the violin as the star.”