"I always feel like, in terms of my career, I'm a little bit behind," says singer/songwriter J.M. James, whose public concert as a Quad City Arts Visiting Artist takes place on December 12 at Davenport's Redstone Room. "You know, it wasn't like I was writing songs and singing at 18. I didn't have a band in high school, I wasn't a 22-year-old trying to get my music out there ... . I didn't do my first solo gig with my own stuff until I was, like, 27."

Given the expansive, spacious, and precise sound that Michigan's The Soil & the Sun achieves on Meridian - the band's third record - two things leap out from its history: that what's now a seven-piece ensemble started as a duo, and that its first two albums were home-recorded by people who didn't really know what they were doing.

Meridian - released in August - marks the first time the group worked with a producer, and the most obvious difference from its predecessors is in its choir-like group vocals, particularly on "How Long." The band has retained its orchestral breadth and adventurousness, but with its soaring collective singing the album becomes something more celestial; songs dominated by gloomy clouds have given way to bright stars.

Working in a proper studio "was a little bit overwhelming, actually," said frontman, primary songwriter, and co-founder Alex McGrath in a recent phone interview, promoting The Soil & the Sun's December 4 performance at Rozz-Tox. "We had the whole world opened up to us, really for the first time. We had to exercise some restraint and not get too caught up in effects ... ."

Madi Diaz's new album Phantom is a break-up record, but you'd never know that from a casual listen - and that's just what the singer/songwriter was aiming for.

"I'm trying to push past the break-up-record thing," she said in a recent phone interview in advance of her November 21 record-release show at Rozz-Tox. "I'm hoping the music pulls it past the cold, harsh idea of a break-up record. ... That's kind of my favorite thing, that juxtaposition: the very dry, grounded, present lyrics with a kind of uplifting, soaring musical bed. That's what I was striving for with the record."

Both Diaz and Christian Lee Hutson - who will be returning to the Quad Cities for the Daytrotter.com show with Diaz - are promoting records whose idiosyncratic pop textures mask darker emotional content.

The band Darlingside drew its name from an old chestnut for writers - the instruction to "murder your darlings." (Killing your darlings would be "darlingcide," which is made softer and more enticingly opaque as Darlingside.)

All the band members met at Massachusetts' Williams College, at which they heard that advice in class.

Guitarist/singer Don Mitchell explained it this way in a recent phone interview promoting his group's November 12 show at the Redstone Room: "You should be willing to get rid of the things that were initially what made you excited about the work, because those ... tend to be the clever ones; those ... tend to be the most indulgent moments. You might need ... to blow up the song in order to put it back together and continue to move forward."

That's an important lesson for songwriting, but it also applied to this band as a whole, which has over the past year-plus reinvented itself - shifting from an atmospheric, earnest rock band to a folk outfit.