There are real places, imag­i­nary places, and places where our expe­ri­ence of real­ity is enhanced by how we imag­ine those places to have been, or to be. We tour those invis­i­ble cities of the mind by walk­ing their actual streets and plac­ing a layer of knowl­edge and imag­i­na­tion on top of the sights we see. We also move to places which spark the dreams we have for our lives, hop­ing to make a fan­tasy life into some­thing real.

If we never make it to such places, or never suc­ceed in them, we can still read about them and hear about them. New record­ings from Son­dre Lerche and Joe Henry sing us tales of places which are real and imag­i­nary at the same time, Williams­burg and New Orleans. Super­fi­cially, there may seem to be a large gap in ambi­tion between the two records, “Heart­beat Radio” and “Blood From Stars,” but the dif­fer­ence is in the per­sonal direc­tion the two musi­cians take — the results are com­pa­ra­bly grand and wonderful.

Son­dre Lerche is very much a first per­son sin­gu­lar musi­cian, not only with every­thing sung from an “I,” but the sense that it’s actu­ally him, not the singer play­ing char­ac­ters in his songs. This makes it easy to accept how incred­i­bly unfair he is, both to his peers and him­self, with the open­ing track ‘Good Luck,’ which is five min­utes and fif­teen sec­onds of arguably the great­est pop music made since the start of the rock era; a sweetly mus­cu­lar, soar­ingly grand song which builds in lay­ers from shim­mer­ing gui­tars, a rolling Bo Did­dley beat and a bril­liant string sec­tion solo extend­ing the end. On top is Lerche’s dry, clear tenor and his immensely appeal­ing rue­ful good cheer. The song has every­thing one could ask for in great pop music; charm, wit, energy, a great beat, a great hook, a bridge that’s out of the ordi­nary enough to be pleas­antly sur­pris­ing and a real cli­max. It’s worth the price of the record alone.

It’s no crit­i­cism to point out that few will be hum­ming the melody, though. Lerche is an excel­lent melodist, fit­ting his lyrics seam­lessly and nat­u­rally to his tunes, and he can do this because he is an excel­lent singer, with range and solid pitch. While too many con­tem­po­rary pop singers are extremely lim­ited as singers, forc­ing their music into pre­dictably short, clipped phrases and tightly com­pressed melodic ranges, Lerche can sing wide inter­vals and long phrases with ease and so can make melodies with a breadth and depth which are uncom­mon. A good singer should have no prob­lem with the A-B-C#-D-A octave arpeg­gia­tion he opens with, but con­tem­po­rary pop music is so dreary in part because there is so lit­tle of this open, gen­er­ous vocal sun­shine bright­en­ing the landscape.

After this spec­tac­u­lar open­ing, “Heat­beat Radio” sat­is­fies. Lerche is a Nor­we­gian trans­planted to Williams­burg, a neigh­bor­hood which over the last decade has drawn young peo­ple from all over the coun­try and the world seek­ing the com­fort and excite­ment of a place where art, music and fash­ion are hap­pen­ing, where they will be under­stood by like-minded peers and dream great things. Call them Hip­sters, but they are this generation’s ver­sion of the kids who used to head to Green­wich Vil­lage, or San Fran­cisco. Williams­burg grows in their imag­i­na­tions long before they ever face the real­ity of liv­ing there, and Lerche’s is a Williams­burg of the mind, where the girls are lithe and pretty and the boys are charm­ing, sweet and mature in an age-appropriate way. He cap­tures a joie-de-vivre and sense of human capa­bil­ity beyond those on dis­play in “Bored To Death,” and a fun­da­men­tal opti­mism which, though it’s at odds with the real­ity of devel­op­ment in the neigh­bor­hood, renews this dream with each song. The album is unswerv­ingly good-natured but not sim­plis­ti­cally sweet. There’s a rough sense of the nar­ra­tive of a charmed, youth­ful life, but the last third of the record takes a sub­tle, darker turn. In the won­der­ful ‘I Guess It’s Gonna Rain Today,’ an under­stand­ing and accep­tance of fail­ure creeps in, and Lerche expresses a rue­ful self-awareness: “Oh, the fine line/between street-smartness/and a smart-ass. Oh, the skip­ping beats of confidence/and the drum-roll/that you thought you could play.” Not every­one who moves to Williams­burg to be in a band can actu­ally play music, not every girl appre­ci­ates your charm, and accept­ing these means see­ing there is real­ity to enjoy along with dreams. The songs which fol­low, ‘Almighty Moon,’ ‘Don’t Look Now’ and ‘Good­night’ have an added sense of weight, tough­ness and matu­rity in con­trast to the exu­ber­ance which pre­ceded them and from which they devel­oped. They bring the album to a com­pletely sat­is­fy­ing close, con­sol­i­dat­ing the explo­sive daz­zle of the first track into a fully real­ized emo­tional jour­ney. “Heart­beat Radio” is not per­fect; while it is full of great songs, music and details, not all the details are great — the pedes­trian bass line of the witty ‘Like Lazenby’ threat­ens to pin the music to the ground, and the lyrics of ‘Words & Music’ alter­nate between fine metaphor and weak, ele­men­tary school rhymes. It doesn’t need to be per­fect, though, when it’s endur­ingly joyful.

Williams­burg is not for every­one though, which is just a small loss. New Orleans is not for every­one either, and that is a tragedy. The after­math of Hur­ri­cane Kat­rina is obvi­ous enough, a government’s com­plete dis­re­gard for human beings who didn’t fit into their grandil­o­quently pos­tur­ing, self-absorbed world­view, but at the core of it is the embrace or rejec­tion of this very coun­try. New Orleans, more than any other sin­gle point on the map and place in the imag­i­na­tion, is the essence of Amer­ica. From it’s very first days, this coun­try was pop­u­lated by peo­ples of many cul­tures, lan­guages and col­ors, here vol­un­tar­ily or oth­er­wise. Geo­graph­i­cally, this coun­try was first cir­cum­scribed then bridged by the Mis­sis­sippi River, and New Orleans is the fecund mouth which birthed cul­ture and com­merce through it into Amer­ica, a humid poly­glot stew of Eng­lish, Span­ish, French, Catholi­cism, Voodoo, Blues, Jazz, whites, blacks and every color in between, stand­ing as a rebuke to the fetishiza­tion of homog­e­niza­tion which those who came later to this coun­try — the Protes­tant swaths swal­lowed up by the great plains and self­ish, fright­ened dem­a­gogues like Pat Buchanan — anx­iously cling to, dearly wish­ing to keep the map of this great and broad land nig­gardly small. Reject New Orleans, and one rejects Amer­ica, while lov­ing the city is as patri­otic a thing as one can do.

Joe Henry loves New Orleans, and loves Amer­ica. He’s made a musi­cal career of describ­ing the Amer­ica of the imag­i­na­tion, putting together a blend of archaic, mod­ern, rural and urban, white and black musi­cal styles. At his best, he’s mag­nif­i­cent, and he seems to seek a sense of grandeur. Musi­cally and lyri­cally he strives for arche­typal metaphors and uni­fied ges­tures that could stand as the paragon of American-roots music. It’s ambi­tious, and he has suc­ceeded, espe­cially with the fully-realized “Scar,” but he’s most often incon­sis­tent, mix­ing pow­er­ful music with songs that don’t quite sus­tain the weight placed on them, which sound more con­structed than played. “Blood From Stars” works com­pletely, though, not only his best record since “Scar,” but a real per­sonal mas­ter­piece for Henry.

It’s a New Orleans record, inten­tion­ally or not, and stands as a com­pan­ion to Allen Toussaint’s “The Bright Mis­sis­sippi,” which Henry pro­duced. That record is ham­pered by a self-conscious sense of try­ing to make a musi­cal point, while this one is com­pletely focussed around a musi­cal core, and flows unerr­ingly for­ward, like a raft head­ing down the big river. It’s New Orleans in the way it puts dif­fer­ent ingre­di­ents together into a stew which comes out being it’s own dish. In the past Henry has gone from coun­try to funk to rock to jazz on dif­fer­ent tracks on an album, here each song is a mix of musics together, espe­cially blues and rural funk, with touches of gospel, marches, jazz and rock. Henry car­ries this off through his songs and through the band he assem­bles, which includes Marc Ribot, David Piltch, Jay Bellerose and Levon Henry, with a won­der­ful cameo from Jason Moran open­ing and clos­ing the album with the gor­geous ‘Light No Lamp When The Sun Comes Down’ (Henry has great taste in side­men, pre­vi­ously employ­ing Don Byron, Brad Mehldau and Ornette Cole­man). The music lives and breaths, every­thing works together, the rhythms, har­monies and cadences seem ideal for each song and phrase and each song seems the ideal vehi­cle for Henry’s richly col­ored, war­b­ley singing. He uses spe­cific details which indi­cate his desire to make some­thing clearly and pow­er­fully Amer­i­can, his imag­ined Amer­ica, but the details are just that; acces­sories which pull the whole out­fit together, not argu­ments to make. The lyric “Of briar and roses” in ‘This Is My Favorite Cage’ points to a spe­cific and impor­tant Amer­i­can tra­di­tion, but the song is Henry’s own cre­ation, the detail merely con­veys his con­text. Like­wise the tango blues ‘Death To The Storm,’ which lays out Henry’s response to a real New Orleans musi­cal tra­di­tion. As on pre­vi­ous records, he sprin­kles sam­ples in the back­ground, and these bits of old-time music and Paul Robe­son pro­vide a sonic back­ground for this imag­ined coun­try. The record has a full, rich bot­tom and an insis­tent, seri­ous tone, but Henry sounds lib­er­ated and light-hearted, even on the slow bal­lads, as if he’s found him­self in a state of com­plete mas­tery of all the music he has worked to appre­hend over the years, and this made his way to his true voice. This is nowhere more clear than on the incred­i­ble ‘All Blues Hail Mary,’ which begins with the great­est rural blues riff one is likely to ever hear, and main­tains the blues feel and struc­ture while elid­ing in enough gospel har­monies for the music to have the del­i­cate tang of funk and fer­vor needed to match the lyrics: “All blues sing of love and death/and you as chances yet to take … All blues and grace by God/And I will have to learn the rest.” Henry’s dis­po­si­tion is darker than Lerche’s, the music much funkier and blue­sier, but his sense of deter­mi­na­tion allows no despair. This is music which pushes moun­tains, tiny bit by tiny bit, until a coun­try moves. [Watch/listen to a per­for­mance at KCRW here]