There is nobody like Andrew Bird in the world, a songwriter and a performer who makes his whistling, his glockenspiel, and his violin at home with guitars, drums, and vocals in detailed, pitch-perfect pop songs that never seem precious or forced, as eccentric as they are.

But when you're as idiosyncratic as Bird is, that means there aren't many people whose vision matches your own. That was one reason that the gestation of The Mysterious Production of Eggs - Bird's breakthrough from 2005 - took so long, with so many false starts.

As weird as it sounds, the sound of Jamaica has always had a soft spot for American country music, often topping the charts in the island nation throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Next week, the mighty Trojan label is issuing a three-CD box collecting classic country songs reinterpreted by Jamaica's favorite sons. Simply titled Trojan Country Reggae, the set features toasters, MCs, and old-school dub professors Toots & the Maytals, David Isaacs, Dennis Brown, Max Romeo, John Holt, Hopeton Lewis, and more twisting up 50 selections, including "Tennessee Waltz," "Stand by Your Man," "Help Me Make It Through the Night," "Sunshine on My Shoulders," "For the Good Times," and (duh!) "Wasted Days & Wasted Nights."

In retrospect, everything turned out well, but Dewey Bunnell was skeptical when America was presented with an opportunity to record its first album for a major label in more than 20 years.

"I had my hesitations in the beginning," Bunnell said in a phone interview last week, "'cause it had been so long, and we had suffered disappointments with the previous projects of all-new material in the '90s. ... Nothing much happened with those, so I was very guarded going into this."

If you've ever heard William Elliott Whitmore's singing - or read reviews of his work, which typically note that he has the weathered pipes of someone at least twice his age - you might snicker at this statement from the singer-songwriter: "I always wished I could sing like Frank Sinatra, or Morrissey, or fucking Dean Martin - those real crooner guys," he said in a phone interview this week.