Of the rushing river of records heading toward us, there are two I’d like to mention, one imminent and one on the horizon: “Love Has Come for You,” by Edie Brickell and Steve Martin, which arrives in April, and “We the Common,” by Thao & the Get Down Stay Down, which arrives this week. Brickell and Martin’s record is a banjo-and-singer collaboration, a form without many footprints. They draw several of their references from bluegrass and old-time banjo styles and from modal forms, the type of reserve that Gillian Welch and David Rawlings have visited and absorbed by a different, more plainspoken route. It’s a capacious reserve, though restricted compared to, say, jazz, with its often much broader instrumentation and more complicated harmonic structures.

Bluegrass, like jazz and blues, is an original American music, made initially by cranky, withered, and sometimes mean-spirited white men drawing on two-part tunes, played mostly on fiddles. The bulk of the tunes were brought from Scotland and Ireland in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. That they could be played at a feral, aggressive tempo was mainly the idea of Bill Monroe. In the nineteen-forties, Monroe established the form of a bluegrass band—guitar and bass in the rhythm section and the leads played by the mandolin, which was Monroe’s instrument, the fiddle, and the banjo. Sometimes there were two fiddles, but otherwise the arrangement never deviated. Earl Scruggs, who first played in Monroe’s band, used a stuttery, syncopated style called Scruggs style that became the template for bluegrass banjo playing. Bluegrass grew into a technically pitiless, rural chamber music, very demanding and insistent on proper form. Electric instruments can conceal shortcomings in technique by means of tone; acoustic stringed instruments can’t. Bluegrass musicians listen for clarity of tone as closely as classical musicians do, and if you buzz a fret or scrape a bow you’re a poseur. Martin’s playing is lyrical and reserved, and it swings. In addition to Scruggs style, he plays a style called clawhammer, which uses thumb and fingernails—Scruggs style uses a thumb pick and two steel finger picks. Clawhammer is older, a mountain style that’s more spare, moodier, and a little more plaintive, and is typically played more slowly than Scruggs style. It’s the style that Pete Seeger helped make popular on his long-neck banjo.

Brickell is perhaps not sufficiently appreciated as a singer. She has a lush, whispery voice and a Texas accent. Her manner is confidential and artless. She likes to stretch words out so that they resonate. Her pitch is precise and her diction is clear. She manages to sing as if she were speaking intimately to another person, the way actors in Shakespeare manage, by means of breathing and pace, to deliver lines as if the thoughts they contain had just occurred to them. There is a gentleness and a lonesome, hopeful quality to her singing that suggests someone who sings to herself without the intention of entertaining, who would sing regardless of whether or not there was an audience.

The song I listen to most often is the first one on the record, “When You Get to Asheville.” It begins with a rising, elegiac banjo line, like something you might play to remember someone, then Brickell sings, “When you get to Asheville, send me an e-mail, tell me how you’re doing, how it’s treating you.” Someone has left, and there is a vibrancy in her voice that makes it sound as if she is managing to preserve herself, though part of her feels the loss.

Thao Nguyen is a singer from San Francisco who grew up in Virginia with a mother who ran a laundromat. She has a reedy voice and she sings a little bit deadpan, as if the force of some experience flattened her manner but also gave her a knowing and slightly aloof perspective. Her delivery is sly, and her songs have the innocent feeling of a child who is hell-bent for the horizon every time you turn your head. She likes stirring, loopy, bottom-heavy arrangements, where liquidy, throaty guitars and thumping basses and drums have sway. No two songs on the record are much alike—the album reminds me of the haphazardness of the White Album, although it’s more thematic than that. Some of the songs have a music-hall quality, some have a carnival atmosphere, and some, such as “City,” are joyful and astute and thrilling. It’s music that makes you move from your bones out. It’s also keenly intelligent and original. The first song, “We the Common,” based on the life of a woman in prison in California, whom Nguyen met through doing prison work, begins with a banjo. It is a sort of inversion of the kind of modal mountain chants that Martin and Brickell sometimes invoke.

On both records, a woman’s voice and observations are central.

Photograph by Kevin Mazur/WireImage/Getty.