I've been in real danger of giving up on folk music. I've been in real danger of giving up on everything that isn't obscure indie pop, frankly, not so much because I think Trembling Blue Stars are so great they obviate the need for Megadeth or Paula Cole or Plainsong, but just because there's so much to learn and pursue that it's perilously easy to let it absorb all my time and attention. I've abandoned my sporadic forays into classical music more or less entirely, for the time being, and I've picked up and put back down, in the last few months, a dozen or so new albums by folk musicians whose previous work I liked, but didn't love. My time has become too precious, the other piles too tall. I haven't been listening to folk radio, either, so the only new albums that creep into my life are the ones connected to people who earned my unqualified loyalty a while ago, by artists who have been recategorized, in my mind, from "folk" to simply "mine".

Bruce Cockburn made a few albums that nearly lost me, too, but 1996's The Charity of Night won me back. Breakfast in New Orleans, Dinner in Timbuktu is essentially the same album, the same sounds and the same rhythms, a few different backing singers (here Lucinda Williams, Margo Timmins and Jonell Mosser, although Jonatha Brooke, Ani DiFranco and Sam Phillips also get cited as inspirations), but I find that in three years I've only become more sympathetic to Cockburn's meandering, unhurried manner, more willing to let him lead me on a tour through a terrain that never seems as navigable when I'm by myself. The cycling guitar and sly pop-culture asides of "When You Give It Away" vanish, through repetition, like Stilgoe described the slats of fences disappearing as you pass them at just the right bike speed. "Last Night of the World" is a sweetly defiant rejoinder to "Sights and Sounds of London Town", a contention that even if the structure of our prison existences imploded on us, we could survive it, and Bruce's dizzy four-syllable flutter on the last word of "If this were the last night of the world / What would I do?" is itself, to me, a wordless universe of counter-arguments. The album's pace sags a little in the middle, and I like Bruce's singing and cultural syntheses so much that deadpan single-genre instrumentals like "Down the Delta" always seem like missed opportunities, and his writing so much that the cover of "Blueberry Hill" feels weirdly tangential, but the album rallies again at the end, for me, with the half-spoken "Let the Bad Air Out" (like a less-industrial version of Dire Straits' "Industrial Disease"), the muted, resonant, atmospheric "Look How Far" (and how many other writers would have had Bruce's intuition that "Look how far the light came / To paint you this way" could be a friend's observation, not a lover's), the spare acoustic-guitar-and-bass duet "Deep Lake", and the effortlessly epic, globe-spanning finale, "Use Me While You Can", its music muttering and sighing less like a song built to contain the words than like this is just the noise that the wind makes, dismissing our maps and blowing through the artifacts of our superstitions, the grids and wires we string up to mark where we think, erroneously, we end and the context in which we exist begins.

Bruce Cockburn weaves himself into the fabric of nature by traveling, asserting the nearness of all faraway places by going there and sitting in their cafés, drinking whatever they drink there, to prove that his chemistry and theirs are compatible. Luka Bloom achieves the same union through stillness, letting his surroundings become so accustomed to his presence that they cease to regard him as autonomous. His 1994 album Turf, just him singing and playing guitar, seemed so perfect to me that I haven't brought myself to buy any of his older records, unable to imagine how adding other musicians wouldn't break the spell. I bought Salty Heaven as quickly as I could, trying to avoid learning anything about it that might dissuade me, and put it on without looking at the credits first, as if by not reading the names of cellists I could sustain the illusion that the cellos aren't there, or that the room just exudes their aura, like perfectly abandoned houses sometimes still smell of leaves and fresh bread. In the end, though, it's remarkable how little difference it makes. There are fourteen musicians on this album, including drums played by producer Peter Van Hooke and keyboards and string arrangements by Rod Argent, but Luka's warm voice and gentle guitar are just as central as they were when there was nothing else, the strings dancing against the backdrops like shadow projections of the movements of his fingers, the drums merely expanding on the cadences of his hands against the body of the guitar. For every mountain pass Bruce crosses, Luka knows a path that crests a hill too low to have a name, for every gasp at an exotic panorama he has a memorized glade from which the same sense of wonder can still be derived. Bruce's travelers are freest in movement, Luka's villagers most jailed when they are carried away from their homes. The anxious, dissatisfied scurrying of tourists has rarely seemed more tragic, futile, ironic and unnecessary than when I imagine, laying one century over another, Bruce's plane flying from Toronto towards Tibet, passing over the boat carrying Luka's expatriates from their Irish homes towards Nova Scotia. When we walk through towns, without understanding that they don't exist to amuse visitors, we mock our own empty homes, not just the strangers' houses the camcorder frames. When they build towns for us to photograph, when we build towns to be photographed, we mock the idea of towns, we condone the conversion of homelands into real estate that welcomes nobody. We wall ourselves out of our own hearts, and need these songs to remind us how to start over.

I hope by loving Bruce Cockburn and Luka Bloom's songs, effectively insinuating myself into their neighborhoods, I'm not part of the problem. But if so, or if the Y2K collapse cuts us all off from anything farther than a voice can carry, then Todd Thibaud lives here in Boston, and plays pretty often at the tiny bar around the corner from my house, and in the quiet that will descend on us when cars and computers and stereos declare their indenture ended and refuse to whir, I bet I could hear him from here. He sounds as Bostonian as Bloom sounds Irish, I think: closer to rock than folk, but so is the rest of this city; closer to Hootie and the Blowfish than Runrig, but so is America. The songs seem to me to have the same grace, to dream of the same imaginary consensuses. "Don't Save Me (It's Alright)" could be earnest Dan Bern, or a truce between Darden Smith and Velvet Crush. "Little Mystery" itself shimmers with guitar arpeggios and Hammond moans. "Anywhere" might be what Richard Buckner would sound like with more confidence. "Last Thing That I Need" and "Suppose" could both easily be Del Amitri, especially the falsetto chorus notes in the latter. The twangy "If That's Alright" might be the Bottle Rockets, the bouncy "Suffer Me" something like Son Volt playing Juice Newton. If everybody who bought Bush and Live records has grown weary of stridency, "Finding Out" could be their next theme song. "It's Only Me" sounds like a mournful, half-country "Cruel to Be Kind", "Never Really Lost" like Dylan updated by the Verve Pipe, the bare, acoustic "Total Stranger" (with a breathy duet between Todd and Merrie Amsterberg) a flawless folk song ready for Joan Baez or Emmylou Harris' next album. And the record ends with "Finer Things", implacable and sturdy, a slow rock song mainstream enough to make Tom Petty sound DIY. I'm not sure there's an experimental chord on this entire album, but as much as I cherish experiment, there's also a reason I shop at the Gap. This is comfort music, cozy music for enfolding, for recuperation, for reassurance. You could argue that there's no real shortage of songs like these, or of performers who embody the most well-worn tropes as if familiarity is the greatest virtue, but if the satellites all crash when the digits flip, and every neighborhood is forced to preserve the character of our culture using their own resources, then you better know who's going to sing songs like these for you.

If we have only three months until society disintegrates, then singers who flaunt their irresponsibility like a cross between Ani DiFranco and Weird Al Yankovic may soon be a luxury we can't afford, and we better appreciate Dan Bern as best we can while we still have the chance. You'll need to be pretty good at appreciating Dan Bern for Smartie Mine, a double album originally sold only at concerts and from his web site, to not be a little more Dan Bern than you really want. I'm kind of surprised, actually, that it doesn't exceed my tolerance, as normally anything remotely describable as novelty music earns my concerted ire, and although Bern's brisk, incisive delivery is hardly Dr. Demento material, the twenty-seven songs here include an alternate version of his combination ode to Tiger Woods, testicles and performing oral sex on Madonna, the quasi-Costello-ish "City of Models", a song about Charles Manson's real last name, a confused serial-killer's monologue, a short sampler of drunken blues pastiches (including one about stalking (sort of) Bruce Springsteen), a tour-van diary with the irrational flair of a flu dream, a sequel to Don McLean's "Vincent " for Vincent Van Gogh's son Joe, a lover's quarrel phrased as an argument concerning the narrator's in-progress play about Bart Giamatti and Pete Rose, a song about sharing your name with a notorious murderer, and the eight-and-a-half minute finale, "True Revolutionaries", which manages to incorporate Timothy McVeigh, Mike Tyson, hereditary breast implants, Conan O'Brien, the bureaucratic fate of the monkey who typed Hamlet, Starbucks, shoe-company sponsorships and Y2K. Just adding all this up, it seems like Smartie Mine should turn out more like stand-up comedy than folk music, and I don't buy stand-up comedy records. But for me, at least, it doesn't. For every ostensible joke-song about celebrities there's one about real people, and even the celebrity songs are rarely glib. I wouldn't claim that Bern is a better writer than Dylan, but I find his performances of his own material far less trying than I do Dylan's. There's a lot of repetition in these songs, verse after verse with exactly the same music, but if you don't mind "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" or "Alice's Restaurant", that shouldn't be a problem. And yes, probably he could have edited these two discs down to one, but if you can't take two hours of Dan Bern, you probably can't take one hour, either.

The definition of folk has to be stretched a little to cover Billy Bragg, but compared to the gaps between Korn and Moby, or between Nine Inch Nails and Eagle-Eye Cherry, the differences between Richard Thompson, Bruce Cockburn, Dan Bern and Billy Bragg seem pretty subtle. This is more true of early Bragg songs than it is of the later albums when he started hiring musicians, but the new b-sides compilation, Reaching to the Converted, spans approximately his whole career. Some of the highlights from the band period are an alternate version of "Greetings to the New Brunette" on which all instruments are performed by Johnny Marr, the affectionate b-side "Sulk" (which Bragg recorded here in Boston the day before the last time I saw him play), a crisp single version of "Accident Waiting to Happen", a decidedly Smiths-like Marr composition called "The Boy Done Good" that Bragg equips with a rather extended relationship/football metaphor even by Bragg's football-tolerant standards, and the ebullient "Sexuality" b-side "Bad Penny". His transitional middle period is represented by a pretty cover of Anna McGarrigle's "Heart Like a Wheel" with Cara Tivey singing the duet part and playing piano, the elegant "Ontario, Quebec and Me", which I'd previously heard only in Mary Lou Lord's version, a "7 O'Clock News/Silent Night"-ish experiment that consists of Johnny Marr playing "Walk Away Renee" on acoustic guitar while Bragg recites an unrelated failed-relationship anecdote, the harmonium-lined lament "Rule Nor Reason", a ringing multi-guitar version of the anti-war anthem "Think Again", an unexpectedly plausible piano-ballad rendition of "Wishing the Days Away", and a shaky Tivey-assisted adaptation of the Beatles' "She's Leaving Home".

Speaking of enmity, Nanci Griffith's The Dust Bowl Symphony is another in the regrettably long line of albums on which symphonies attempt to remake pop songs, either with or without the writer's participation. This seemed like a terrific idea when I was playing in my middle-school orchestra, but after quite a few modern adult examples, perhaps the only two I had much hope for being Symphonic Music of Yes and the Split Enz equivalent ENZSO, I've concluded that it basically doesn't work. Combining a symphony with Nanci Griffith's humble country/folk songs and her thin, reedy singing voice is an even worse idea than most, and picking the London Symphony Orchestra, of all people, makes this the setup for a massive cultural disaster.

I'm not enough of a Linda Ronstadt fan for an album she sings half of to mean as much to me as one Emmylou sings all of, but half of this album is more than Emmylou's third of the Harris/Ronstadt/Parton Trio albums, and I'll take what I can get. I never really bothered to distinguish between the individual songs on Trio II, but I find these developing their own identities much more readily. Andy Prieboy's resigned "Loving the Highway Man", with guitars by Ethan Johns, Greg Leisz and Andy Fairweather Low, falls somewhere between country and Eno/Lanois-era U2. Emmylou's "Raise the Dead", another benediction to influences (Hank Williams, Sam Cooke, Bill Monroe, Robert Johnson), is as close as this album comes to Wrecking Ball, but Jackson Browne's "For a Dancer", with Emmylou and Neil Young backing Linda up, ends up somewhere between Fleetwood Mac and Patty Smyth. Emmylou and Linda trade lines on Rosanne Cash's "Western Wall", but Emmylou takes the lead for David Olney's "1917", Kate & Anna McGarrigle returning one of Emmylou's favors by helping Linda out with the harmonies. Paul Kennerley plays on his own wiry, mid-tempo "He Was Mine", but Ethan Johns' minimal guitar and percussion are the only accompaniment for the clipped version of Emmylou and Jill Cunniff's "Sweet Spot". Johns brings in an Optigan to help turn Leonard Cohen's "Sisters of Mercy" into a period madrigal. Waves of electric guitar wash over a soaring, passionate production of Patty Griffin's "Falling Down". Patti Scialfa's "Valerie" is musically understated, but has perhaps Emmylou's most dramatic lead. The combination of Linda and Emmylou's voices sounds uncannily like Sinéad O'Connor on Sinéad's "This Is to Mother You". The McGarrigles sing on (and helped Emmylou write) the no-regret travelogue "All I Left Behind", and the record ends with one of its stranger ideas, Emmylou and Neil singing harmony for Linda doing Bruce Springsteen's "Across the Border". I'm not sure this album means much, really, and maybe I don't give either of the women album credit for making it, but I'd rather they did this than however else they could have spent a week in Tuscon.

If there's an opposite to a casually-assembled album of duet covers, it might be Cindy Bullens' Somewhere Between Heaven and Earth. Bullens' last album came out in 1989. In 1996, her then-eleven-year-old daughter, Jessie, died of cancer. Grief turned into songs only gradually, but in 1997 Beth Nielsen Chapman's Sand and Water, largely about the process of rebuilding her life after the death of her husband, came out, and Beth leant Cindy friendship, inspiration and her producer, Rodney Crowell. Over the next couple years Cindy's project drew in Bonnie Raitt, Bryan Adams, Tony Berg, Steven Soles, Cindy's older daughter Reid, Benmont Tench, Bill Lloyd, Lucinda Williams, Bob Ludwig and Bob Clearmountain, and so here is Jessie's memorial, a rousing heartland folk-rock album of disconcerting honesty and deceptive strength, like a therapy session conducted by Springsteen and Melissa Etheridge. Be prepared, though, if the idea interests you. Sand and Water was a relatively oblique recovery album, one it was possible to listen to without being entirely conscious of the subject matter. Somewhere Between Heaven and Earth is far more blunt. "My youngest child is now an angel", "Boxing With God" unflinchingly explains. Sand and Water comes from a later stage than most of these songs, and where Beth was able to paint the glimmers of new hope, most of these songs are still struggling with loss, inventing mantras to see what consolation they might provide. "I can take some kind of comfort in / Knowing you're / In better hands", Cindy tries to convince herself in the driving "In Better Hands", a little like a Patty Larkin song that mutates into Don Henley. "Even the lights of Paris / Can't outshine your love", confesses "The Lights of Paris", not even bothering to qualify its despair. "I Gotta Believe in Something" (with Beth and Bonnie singing) is resolute, but "That there's just plain nothing / Don't seem right to me" isn't exactly a galvanizing formulation of faith. "Somewhere Between Heaven and Earth" (the duet with Bryan Adams) is the promise of deferred reunion, Cindy's version of Beth's "Beyond the Blue". "A Thousand Shades of Grey" moves like an anthem, encouraged by Mark Jordan's ringing piano and George Marinelli's writhing lead guitar, but the lyrics' closest approach to hope is an angry and skeptical "There must be some great reward / For lasting out each day". The harrowing "Water on the Moon" begs for new technology to somehow bring Jessie back. "Boxing With God" finds Jessie, Cindy and Cindy's father all facing the same battles, though, the first hint that grief might find another outlet, and although "The End of Wishful Thinking" isn't quite acceptance, it's at least a realization that acceptance is possible, and perhaps desirable. "As Long as You Love (Scarlet Wings)", with Reid singing the choruses, is a lullaby for all three of them. And "Better Than I've Ever Been" isn't Beth's "Happy Girl", either, and the actual line is "Maybe I'll be better than I've ever been", supposition in the future tense, not affirmation in the present. But it's a footfall on a road that might lead back, or, if not back, then somewhere new, someplace where you never recover from anything, and never even want to, but keep going anyway, keep living no matter what you lose. We can't give up on folk music, because giving up on folk music is giving up on people. We keep singing, whether the song is salvation or self-destruction, because the only other alternative is silence, and without noises there's nothing to ward off the dark, and no way to find each other in it.