After singer/songwriter Rachael Yamagata was freed from her contract with Warner Bros., she called producer John Alagia about making her third album. She didn't send him songs to consider, and they didn't discuss material. The next day, they were making arrangements to get equipment and musicians to his house in Maryland.

"Within a few weeks, we were ... actually doing it," Yamagata said in a phone interview this week, promoting her November 12 performance at the Redstone Room.

Moving quickly was a response to "several years of kind of being in this holding-pattern experiment with major record labels," she said. "It was a lot of leap-before-you-look scenarios. I just knew that if you got the right people in the room, we could make it work."

And the right people wanted to help. "I think people look at me maybe as an underdog of sorts, always wanting good things for me," she said. "A lot of my peers I think have felt the frustration with me about 'Where's your next record?' or 'Why aren't you on the road?'"

As "This Masquerade" begins on her recently released live CD recorded at Davenport's Redstone Room, Pamela Reese Smith's voice emerges from the piano prelude of Manny Lopez III as a husky, tuneful whisper, growing louder and more intense from phrase to phrase. As she builds, she blends breathiness and fullness to create a wistful and passionate melody. Her use of a light, breathy tone establishes the mournful mood of the song, especially when singing the word "lost," imparting confusion and hopelessness.

Her voice continues to soften and grow with the lyrics. When singing the phrase "this masquerade," she starts quietly and then allows her voice to expand as she holds out the line -communicating strength, despair, and other feelings.

Throughout the album, Smith employs this effectively expressive technique, and her big voice creates a deep, encompassing sound. But at times she misses the pitch a little, and the heavy richness of her voice becomes a disadvantage.

Blue Grass resident David G. Smith calls himself a "50-something," and on Saturday he'll mark the release of his first solo full-length album at the Redstone Room.

It's undoubtedly a late start, but Smith said in a phone interview this week that he has genetics on his side. Two of his grandparents made it to their mid 90s, and one lived to 105. So by his calculation, "I have a 20-year career ahead of me."

It's off to a good start. Non-Fiction is a solid debut for the longtime songwriter - acoustic rock that's sometimes funky and sometimes gentle, smartly produced and performed with conviction.

The cliché says that good writers mostly write what they know, so it's little wonder that Paul Thorn has crafted an under-the-radar career as a respected songwriter and performer.

The title of his 2010 album is Pimps & Preachers, and he speaks of both from experience: His father was a minister, and his uncle was a pimp. "When I was a kid, them was the two guys that I hung around a lot," Thorn said in a phone interview this week. "I got to witness what went on on both sides of the tracks of life - the dark and the light side of life."

That uncle also taught the future songwriter to box and served as his trainer, and in 1988 Thorn fought (and lost to) Roberto Durán, considered one of the sport's greats. Thorn also used to skydive.

In the mid-1990s, Thorn was plucked from a day job in a furniture factory and a regular gig singing in a pizza joint, signed to a major-label contract. And the first concert he ever attended was a Sting show - at which he was the opening act.