When saxophonist, flutist, composer, and singer Karl Denson discusses Brother's Keeper, the new record from Karl Denson's Tiny Universe, you could be forgiven for thinking he's talking about essays instead of songs.

After he finished the first drafts of the songs, he sent them to Tiny Universe keyboardist David Veith, who did what Denson called "revisions." Switchfoot's Jon Foreman also helped out with vocals and some melodies. "I wanted to get some depth as far as not having it just be my ideas," Denson said last week in a phone interview.

Three months of "revisions" resulted in the record being extraordinarily exact, particularly for the funk/soul genre, yet Brother's Keeper never sounds insular or overworked; the grooves not only survive but often sing.

"You think of writing songs as just sitting around the campfire, and everybody has an idea, or you have a great story you tell with a guitar," said Denson, whose six-piece band will perform at RIBCO on Saturday, September 19. But certain types of music -- to be done well -- require time and sweat. "The idea of more pop records or even a great classical piece -- there's always revision going on," he said. "The best way to do a record is to do it at least once and possibly twice before you actually record. That was the process with this record."

Like many other singers/songwriters, Noëlle Hampton moved to Austin, Texas, to make music. What she didn't expect is that it would stop her career cold.

It took five years, but Hampton is back, with the album Thin Line and a fall tour stopping at the Redstone Room on September 18. With an expressive, soulful, and purposeful voice as comfortable in rockers as it is in ballads, Hampton sounds right at home in the record's unforced and well developed (if somewhat generic) tunes.

Roman Candle has had bad luck following good fortune in the music business, and it's almost certainly more frustrating than just-plain-rotten luck.

What was supposed to be the group's major-label debut, on a Hollywood Records subsidiary, was shelved for nearly three years despite persistent buzz about the band and the record. The long-time-coming album prompted Pitchfork to call Roman Candle "one of the great unsubstantiated rumors of modern pop-rock."

V2 Records eventually bought the masters and put out the CD, The Wee Hours Revue, in 2006. But that label was effectively closed seven months later. It was at that point that the members of Roman Candle had an epiphany.

There's nothing directly political about Everything Touches Everything, the third album from These United States. But the record could be called the five-piece band's Obama collection, even though you'd be hard-pressed to find more than hints of that in the content.

It's not nearly as precious or knee-jerk as it sounds. It's not a Pollyannaish perspective, and there are no unicorns or rainbows. It's more about a mood.

The questioning refrain of "Night & the Revolution" is tellingly ambiguous -- "How do you think this night is going to conclude?" is paired with "Where do you think this revolution is going to go?" -- and it seems more about a party than partisanship.

But as songwriter/singer/guitarist Jesse Elliott was assembling the record, he decided that its song selection would hinge on the outcome of the election. The album that will be released on September 1 is significantly different from the one that would be released had John McCain won.