I would have bought Emma Townshend's album, I'm almost sure, even if I'd known nothing about it, just because she's Pete Townshend's daughter. It's a bizarre milestone, to me, at once unsettling and delightful, that there's now a musician I like who has a child old enough to make an album of her own. Buckley, Dylan and Lennon fans, among others, will have already had variants of this odd experience, but this is my first personal encounter with it. I'm not sure what I expected from the association, as it's reasonably difficult to imagine what a female Pete Townshend would sound like, even if there were any reason to believe the inheritance would be that literal. As best I can tell, actually, my interest had no particular agenda. I didn't buy the album because I thought I'd enjoy it, I bought it just to find out what it was. A part of me, I suspect, thinks that I will learn something from witnessing the relationship between a parent and a child in music that I would not from a book or a movie, or even my own life. Another part is probably indulging in nothing more than my own version of prying tabloid voyeurism, wondering what the family lives of the famous are like. And a third part, knowing how hard young musicians often struggle to transcend even the influences they consciously make manifest in their music, wanted to see how Emma would cope with having her "influences" imposed on her a priori.

I haven't learned to love Patsy Cline, yet, but I've started to understand, I think, why people might. There is a long tradition of female voices in country music, and to lesser extents in folk and rock as well, from Judy Collins down to Celine Dion, that Patsy Cline was not part of. Women have traditionally been separated from the band, set aside (and "in front" is still aside) in a spotlight. They are accompanied, in very much the old half-chivalric, half-patronizing sense of the word, where men are usually more apt to be included in the band, given compatriots instead of chaperones. The five performances at this year's Oscars were a telling demonstration of the endurance of this dichotomy, however anachronistic it should be by now: the four women (I'm going to consider Michael Bolton female for the purposes of this argument) looked completely at home at the center of an empty stage, in an evening gown, with a microphone in their hands, singing over an anonymous orchestra concealed discretely behind them. They were there as performers, not musicians (Celine Dion, in particular, might as well be the World Karaoke Champion), and the music served them only as a pedestal does a statue, to ensure that the audience had to gaze up at them, in a posture of obeisance. (Which, even if it's bad for music, is often good for soundtracks, and in Titanic's case, for example, seems to me like exactly what the film called for.) Elliott Smith, on the other hand, looked like he was experiencing a combination of his own private Titanic and that dream where you get to school and realize you're dressed like the seventh Village Person. I don't think I've ever seen a more instructive depiction of "surreal"; I kept expecting John Cleese to emerge from the wings to explain that the only reason Smith was still standing on the stage was that he'd been nailed there, or else Alice to coming running in after him waving a sheaf of sheet music labeled "Sing Me". His hopelessly incongruous guitar looked like a paste-board Elvis-impersonator's prop left over from the mindless dance medley earlier in the evening. "Miss Misery" is an intimate, involving song, designed for small rooms, where avoiding eye-contact is more notable than making it (and thus arguably miscast, even in Ben and Matt's affectionate, endearing film). Every time the orchestra swelled up behind him, it felt to me like the sadistic freak-show proprietor jabbing the emaciated Lizard Boy in the back to get him to writhe reptilianishly, so the marks would feel like they'd seen a quarter's worth of exotic deformity. Even if the song had needed more instruments, they should have been there with Elliott, crowded around him on a too-small stage, the tight space of the stage an extension of the tight space of the audience, emphasizing the community that exists between the player and the listeners. This (at least outside of Hollywood and Las Vegas) is the male performing tradition: gather around the storyteller, the telling cannot exist without us. The corresponding female tradition: stand back from the goddess, she is exempt from our laws and limitations. The wall between the two has been breached countless times during the last few decades, of course, but the populations on either side continue to display a stubborn and disheartening homogeneity. The magic of Patsy Cline's voice and presence, I think, and so too Cheri Knight's, is that they will not keep to the confines of their spotlight. They are part of the music, not objects of its regard. Belonging to the male tradition is less of a distinction for Cheri than it was for Patsy in her day, but it still frames a listening experience that is much closer to Richard Thompson than Dolly Parton.

The bridge between The Northeast Kingdom and Winterland for me, this week, and thus the album that prevents my desire to move to Manitoba and take up sprout farming and my desire to keep living two blocks away from MIT in a thicket of extension cords and speaker cables from declaring all out-war with each other just yet, is Boston subway busker Mary Lou Lord's major-label debut, Got No Shadow. It's taken a few weeks, much longer than I anticipated, to find this album a place in my life. I had decided, on the basis of Mary Lou's previous EPs, that her great genius was as a disassembler, stripping obscure but worthy pop songs down to their vulnerable guitar-and-voice essences. Got No Shadow, however, which features a full band almost throughout, led by mentor Nick Salomon, really has only two non-Salomon covers, Freedy Johnston's "The Lucky One" and a creaky old-style folk song called "Shake Sugaree", written by Elizabeth Cotten, neither of whose originals I've heard. As a result, my first few attempts to assimilate this record floundered pretty quickly. "Why", I asked, with rhetorical dismay, "did Mary Lou Lord, of all people, decide to make a mundane folk-pop-rock record, instead of something that took advantage of her unique gift?" I wanted an album halfway between Tori Amos and Billy Bragg, and instead got one halfway between Elliott Smith and Shawn Colvin.