FOUNDERS’ KEEPERS: Two Thompsons, Jon Langford, and Madeleine Peyroux

The curse of Linda Thompson is that she is known principally for the exquisite agony of 1982’s Shoot Out the Lights, the divorce album she recorded and toured behind with soon-to-be-ex-husband, Richard. And for her voice, no small gift but rendered undependable by a condition called spasmodic dysphonia.

Her son — their son — Teddy has lured her on stage and in the studio for a handful of albums, abetted by the extended clan of Wainwrights and McGarrigles and Roches. His latest plan to keep his mother’s music in the world is cleverly titled Proxy Music (complete with parody artwork that might be a step too clever) and salutes the songs of Linda Thompson. New songs (or at least songs that had not been recorded) matched to voices Teddy wanted to hear sing them, including Eliza Carthy and The Proclaimers, but largely family of one kind or another.

The album opens with daughter Kami Thompson’s extraordinary reading of “The Solitary Traveller,” a meditation on loss — voice silenced, children gone, husband long gone — placed amid a splendid ’70s British folk revival setting (it’s not a hurdy-gurdy, just a keyboard, alas). Kami’s vocals are striking and brave and daring.

Proxy Music‘s best moments — like Rufus Wainwright’s “Darling This Will Never Do” — have the feel of an intimate performance, an off night when everybody’s friends and family showed up to take a turn just for the fun of it. Perhaps by midnight the delicacy of “I Used To Be So Pretty” wouldn’t cut so deeply, no matter the tenderness with which Ren Harvieu sings “I have a mailbox full of bills / and a mouth full of pills / life was easier / so much easier / when I was still pretty.” (Oh, and Richard Thompson plays guitar on that one. Of course he does.)

The Rails’ “Mudlark” combines with Dori Freeman’s “Shores of America” to span the disparate yet joined traditions of British and white American folk music. Or one can simply enjoy.

Throughout, Linda Thompson and her co-writers have conspired to cloak mature meditations — what pop music simply can’t do — with all the grace age imposes. Ending with “Those Damn Roches,” everybody in the chorus, a family better singing together than talking to each other.

By comparison, Richard Thompson’s most recent release, Ship to Shore, is a simpler, less ambitious affair — but only if one listens to the words and not the guitars. “Maybe,” say, is a pretty randy thing for a 75-year-old to sing, but the guitars are jaunty, the beat is a bop, and his voice is ever rich and portentous.

It is tempting to imagine Mr. Thompson thinks himself forever young — or, at least, ageless — but there’s no missing intimations of mortality in the opening “Freeze” or the brooding of “The Fear Never Leaves You” (“Roll the dice and who decides? / One man lives, another man dies”). Or “The Old Pack Mule,” which is about being so desperate you carve up the “Poor old mule, they worked his arse to death.” Just a little light entertainment, just another sparkling album from Mr. Thompson.

As long as the subject seems to be ageless British singers, perhaps a word about Jon Langford & The Bright Shiners’ latest, Where It Really Starts, is in order. Langford has the distinction of being the only artist both to appear on the cover of No Depression (among the Waco Brothers, #7) and to illustrate one (#33, of Lucinda Williams).

Langford is a constantly working artist. This newest four-piece is anchored by producer Alice Spencer (Shinyribs) and her voice, which has forced phrasing discipline on Langford, all of it gently flavored by Tamineh Geramy’s violin and all the things John Szymanski plays. And Brian Beattie’s mellotron, though he’s the recording engineer, sorta, who brought lots of instruments to the sessions as well.

Regardless, it’s a tight affair, a counterpoint to much of Langford’s intentionally ramshackle oeuvre. “For the Queen of Hearts,” which opens, dances on the same phrase so hard it comes near to sounding like a Vampire Weekend outtake. “Discarded” deftly conflates a breakup with the long-ago closure of a British Steel plant. (All politics is personal, and vice versa. Or at least vice.) “On a Scale of 1 To 9” is a delightful bit of vocal pop with elegant barbs worthy of Robyn Hitchcock. The appended untitled track finishes with a cleansing bit of welcome chaos.

Like Norah Jones and Lizz Wright, Madeleine Peyroux is principally described as a jazz vocalist, as a gently creative interpreter of the 20th-century songbook: Tom Waits, Johnny Mercer, Bessie Smith, Hank Williams, and Joni Mitchell. Let’s Walk is her first album since 2018, but hardly the first to center her own compositions.

From the gospel call-and-response of the title track — which could almost be an undiscovered Pete Seeger anthem — to the Cajun-inflected “Me and the Mosquito,” Peyroux explicitly means these songs as a post-COVID re-entry, a social reckoning, and, sometimes, a bit of a romp.

“Nothing Personal,” her somewhat generalized account of sexual assault, might need a trigger warning. But if one requires a single, singular example of what Peyroux can accomplish with her voice and words, there it is. The words are clever. The fury is contained, elegant, distant. And extraordinarily real. And the music is beautiful.