It is in times of crisis that a person learns who his or her true friends are. Alejandro Escovedo discovered he has a lot of friends.

Even if you haven't heard of Escovedo, you've likely heard of them: John Cale of the Velvet Underground, Los Lonely Boys, the Cowboy Junkies, Son Volt, Charlie Musselwhite, Lucinda Williams, Calexico, Steve Earle. Those people and more than two dozen others cut tracks for Por Vida: A Tribute to the Songs of Alejandro Escovedo. The goal wasn't merely to honor the man, or just offset some of his medical bills, but perhaps to save his life.

Singer/songwriter Escovedo is widely and deeply respected in the alt-country community, and he has the meager bank account to prove it. He even called his live disc More Miles Than Money. The alternative-country magazine No Depression called him its artist of the decade for the 1990s.

The covers album is time-honored stopgap, and Susan Tedeschi's Hope & Desire CD from last year fits the mold perfectly. The blues belter/guitarist signed with the Verve Forecast label in 2004 when she was pregnant with her second child, Sophia, and her own material wasn't yet ready to record. It had been several years since she'd put out new songs - Wait for Me came out in 2002 - and the label wanted some product.

"They were sort of in a hurry to get one together," Tedeschi said in an interview last week with the River Cities' Reader. So the label gathered Tedeschi and producer Joe Henry to pick some songs.

On the cover of the Death Ships' Seeds of Devastation, a resplendent Midwestern farm scene - complete with stalks of wheat, a dragonfly, and a red barn - sets the tone. But on the inside panel, as the barn burns down behind him, a boy in a blue winter coat pokes a white paper boat with a stick.

The band's name and multiple visual and verbal contradictions create an eerie haze around Death Ships' debut CD, but the songs are anything but dark. With its roller-rink keyboard, start-stop beat, tambourine, and hand-claps, "Symmetrical Smiles" is a hip-swiveling rocker. The song is fleshed out by a twangy guitar and Death Ships singer Dan Maloney's clear, bright voice. Similar to bands such as Essex Green, Ladybug Transistor, and Beulah, Iowa City's Death Ships honor the tradition of '60s icons the Kinks and the Zombies.

When Michael Burks was 12, he wrote a letter to his idol B.B. King, "telling him that, hopefully, one day I could meet him and show him I could play like him," he said in a recent interview.

That wish actually came true when Michael was 39. In 1996, King celebrated his 71st birthday at a show in Little Rock, Arkansas, and Michael played alongside the blues icon. "All my life I'd been loving this man, admiring this man!" he said. It was a defining moment, and just the start of well-deserved recognition for Michael's lifelong immersion in the blues.