Despite being an internationally known singer and songwriter, Gary Jules -- performing on Sunday at Huckleberry's in a Daytrotter.com show -- has neither a manager nor a publicist.

He did at one time, riding his and Michael Andrews' version of Tears for Fears' "Mad World" to the top of the UK pop charts in late 2003.

But the success, he said in a phone interview last week, led to "a lot of stuff I considered to be, I don't know, pork-barrel spending, fat that needed to be trimmed. ...

"I ended up in a lot of situations that I wasn't comfortable with. ... This is not what I started doing music for. A lot of those things were generated either through the people I had hired or the miscommunication between me and them."

By uncomfortable situations, Jules doesn't mean hookers and drugs. ("I'm totally fine with hookers and drugs," he joked.) But managers and publicists would try to get him in Rolling Stone and Spin and other major music magazines, while Jules felt his audience was more likely to read Dwell.

"You can spend a whole lot of money on traditional music-publicity stuff without ever really getting anything done ... ," he said. "There are a lot more interesting ways to do publicity and to have a career these days."

Jules would know. He had the happy accident of "Mad World," used at the emotional climax of Richard Kelly's 2001 cult-classic film Donnie Darko, other successes in film and television licensing, and the on-air support of influential radio hosts Nic Harcourt (of KCRW in Santa Monica, California) and Bruce Warren (of WXPN in Philadelphia).

Listening to the debut album from Pronto, the quartet fronted by Wilco keyboardist Mikael Jorgensen, the inescapable reference point is the singer/songwriter genre from the 1970s -- warm, organic, a little hazy, and mostly ready for AM radio. One can't avoid, for instance, Randy Newman's influence on "What Do You Know About You?"

Jorgensen, in a recent phone interview promoting his band's September 18 show at RIBCO, sounded tired of the comparison -- "We didn't set out ... [to] make a record that everybody's going to say sounds like the '70s," he said -- but he didn't deny its accuracy.

All Is Golden is not all soft-focus AM-radio fare. "Monster" has the muscle of power pop, while "I Think So" belies Jorgensen's love of experimental music as it devolves into a coda of sax and electronics and noise. But even when the songs themselves don't fit the decade, there's still a pervasive vibe.

The surprise is that Jorgensen is a relatively recent convert, for a long time not being a fan of the era's musical giants -- Neil Young and the Rolling Stones, for example -- or even the premise that lyrics are a meaningful vehicle for musical expression. He and his collaborators on previous experimental, instrumental music projects dismissed lyrics as merely "a vehicle for the melody."

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.