Most supernatural tales are marked by that moment when a double walks in — a longed-for loved one, usually, whose presence makes our terrified heroine relax for a beat, but then recoil in horror at this stranger in familiar skin. The doubles may be demons or revenants, or humans driven so utterly out of their minds that they can no longer recognize themselves. In the scariest instances, the double is the self: Natalie Portman facing the dance-studio mirror in “Black Swan,” watching her own face go dark and her limbs grotesquely twist.

Doubling deepens horror stories by forcing us to confront the ways we ourselves are cracked: the inching decay of every human body, the lunatic edge in every human mind. Rock-era pop music also taps into this force, though more triumphantly. Unleashing both the sexuality and the ugliness others repress, rock stars double themselves as heroes, not demons: human, but wilder and freer. Only occasionally does a rock artist make that uncanny transformation the very essence of her work, revealing its process, confronting its consequences.

Polly Jean Harvey is rock’s master polymorph. For 20 years she has pulled herself through the ectoplasmic core of whatever musical style currently fascinates her — blues, post-punk, gothic rock, Victorian piano ballads — to show us how music can reshape the person performing it. Her lyrics, too, often dwell on violent acts of self-uncovering. Imagining herself as a man, a mother, a gargoyle or a ghost, lining up those identities within the singing and other sounds that best fit them, Harvey has created a body of work that serves as a resonant hall of mirrors, where listeners can go to explore the way music, and life itself, dissembles and renews them.

Harvey’s eighth studio album, “Let England Shake,” transforms her and her music in a groundbreaking way. On this album, which explores how nationalism both binds us and blows us apart, Harvey becomes a “we.” Love of country is her subject; the muddy fields where nations baptize themselves in blood are, mostly, her settings. And the music, at its core, is patriotic folk — some the battle cries sung in pubs or as soldiers plod forward; others the sentimental ballads shared by those left behind to record loss and justify its cost.

“I wanted the music to have an energy and sense of being uplifting, of energizing, of unifying, of … gathering together as people,” Harvey recently told the English magazine NME. “I wanted it to be communal. So the melodies had to be something that were conducive to wanting to sing along with.… Many voices could sing these words.”

"People have been talking this week about the 100th birthday of Ronald Reagan," said Ward Emling, director of the Mississippi Development Authority's Office of Film and Culture, from the stage of the Clive Davis Theater in the Grammy Museum on Thursday night. "This also would have been the 100th birthday of Robert Johnson."

Directing the audience's thoughts toward the legacy of the great Delta bluesman, Emling defined the mission of the second annual Mississippi Night, part of the museum's festivities for Grammy week. As one of several officials in the room repping for the state that calls itself the birthplace of American music, Emling had an agenda: convince the VIPs in attendance that a trip to the Deep South can still unlock the deepest meanings of America's greatest art form.

Mississippi Night, which Grammy Museum Executive Director Robert Santelli confirmed will be an ongoing annual event, brings bright young talent from the Magnolia State to Los Angeles to promote tourism and music-industry investment in the region. This year, much talk was of the Misssissippi Blues Trail, a statewide path of interactive markers tracing the development of one of contemporary music's fundamental styles. A film offered testimony from Mississippi native B.B. King as well as stars such as Robert Plant and Bonnie Raitt about the continued relevance of the Delta region.

The loudest case was made, however, by the trio of musical acts who provided the night's entertainment. Touching on deep blues, atmospheric folk-pop, and gritty, wide-reaching rock, these artists were anything but mired in the past.

The Homemade Jamz Blues Band is a remarkably young sibling trio that has been taking the international blues festival circuit by storm. Fronted by 18-year-old Ryan Perry, a gritty shouter with flashy guitar skills, the group demonstrated a hopped-up approach to classic blues. Perry's younger brother Kyle was a fleet-fingered secret weapon on bass, while sister Taya, only 12, thumped the drums like a little Meg White. Dad Renaud Perry provided support on harmonica as Ryan strutted through the crowd, his trademark muffler guitar lighting up as he leaned in toward the ladies and showed his prowess.

Shannon McNally was as laid-back and pensive as the Homemade Jamz Band was hot. The singer-songwriter, a New York native, relocated to northern Mississippi after Hurricane Katrina drove her from her chosen home of New Orleans, and she spoke with amusement about the process of assimilation, noting that the skinny street cats she'd adopted from the 9th Ward soon grew fat from eating the big bugs and other critters in the fields near her home in Holly Springs. McNally sang material from the albums she recorded with the late hill country great Jim Dickinson, as well as "Thunderhead," a vivid song about childbirth from her new album, Western Ballad. Her heartfelt rendition of "Miss the Mississippi and You," first made popular by the state's favorite country son Jimmie Rodgers, showed her soul-deep affinity for her new environment.

For Jimbo Mathus, that connection is a given -- raised in Clarksdale and still hugging the border between the north end of his home state and Tennessee, the Squirrel Nut Zippers founder turned solo raconteur has spent his whole life becoming, as he put it, "fluent in this strange tone."

Mathus, who is a ripping guitar player, regaled the crowd with tall tales and his fractured country blues, first solo and then with help from a local band that included Zippers drummer Chris Phillips. The rollicking, too-short set offered strong support for Mathus' pitch to this music-biz crowd -- which succinctly said what the Mississippi officials had taken much longer to communicate. "Put us to work in Mississippi and in Memphis, Tenn.," he said. "We're the best, and we work cheap!"

-- Ann Powers

Feminine reticence is a deeply embedded trait. Women songwriters in the rock era have used it strategically. Freedom is linked to noise, the earthy squalls of Janis and Aretha or the riot grrrls’ indignant hollering. Yet quieter voices can get to the heart of many predicaments women face, precisely because they embody those binds: the challenge of asserting oneself in a father-dominated family or a social guy zone; the persistent worry that raising your voice might mark you as overly needy, crass or just too big.

Two new releases from women sure of their quiet voices reflect that predicament. Jessica Lea Mayfield is only 21, but she’s been performing for years as part of a family bluegrass band, and “Tell Me” is her second solo album. Working with her producer, Dan Auerbach of the Black Keys, Mayfield has developed a sound that’s coy and plain-spoken, a fascinating take on the demure female singer, especially as that role has unfolded within Mayfield’s chosen home base of Americana. Her cool connects her to Patsy Cline; her haunted side recalls Gillian Welch. She also has a bit of the shambolic indie rocker in her, sometimes even sounding like a female J. Mascis.

Mayfield’s slim soprano relies on a sly drawl that makes you wonder if she might be teasing you, and her lyrics are frank and poetic, the confessions of a young heart learning how to contain itself. “Where did my … self … control … go?” she breathes ever so carefully in “Run Myself Into the Ground,” as Auerbach’s mix of spacey electronics and vintage tremolo guitar form shadows behind her. Mayfield’s internal debate about whether self-control is something worth preserving is her most interesting subject, a deeply relevant counterpoint to the exhibitionistic tendencies of so many young performers.

Like Narnia or some of Shakespeare's fantastical lands, Alabama is a place whose gateways and byroads are often not immediately visible. This is true of the landscape, whose thick forests give way to meandering prairies and watery deltas; and of the culture, which incorporates a deeply unsettling history and an equally powerful sense of defiant regional pride.

If you've never spent time in Bama, the state might come to mind only as the punchline in a redneck joke or the troubling moral of a fable about human dignity and civil rights. Otherwise, outsiders probably think of Southern cliches: college football, shack barbecue, music made exclusively on banjo-cluttered back porches or in smoky juke joints.

But let the stereotypes loosen their grip, and Alabama -- like any place you don't really know -- surprises. The first rocket to go to the moon was built in Huntsville. Gay Talese, the éminence grise of New Yorkish writerly urbanity, learned his craft as a University of Alabama student, writing sports columns about the Crimson Tide. The impoverished agricultural Black Belt is, startlingly, home to one of the nation's most innovative architectural training programs. And an organic farming movement is gaining steam around Birmingham.

You’ve seen this guy before. Plaid shirt, acoustic guitar; bedhead forelock flopping over a smoldering eye. Bobby Long seems completely comfortable inhabiting the stereotype of the recondite singer-songwriter — he’s even fielded the “new Dylan” epithets thrown his way, admitting that he bought his signature Gibson J-200 after spotting ol’ Bob wielding one like Paul Bunyan’s ax on the cover of “Nashville Skyline.” How could a young artist this adherent to folk-rock clichés be any good?

Long, a 24-year-old English expat known until now mostly for his friendship with the undead rebel Robert Pattinson, achieves success through means as traditional as the framework he’s adopted. His swaggery growl goes tender in the right places; his tunes are sturdy but graceful, like the curve of something hand-carved.

With titles like “Penance Fire Blues” and “In the Frost,” his manly, slightly supernatural ballads tap into an epoch’s worth of old stories, yet his metaphors are original enough to keep the songs from feeling stale. Long sometimes gets a little lost in his own imagination, but it’s better to display a weakness for overreaching than the writerly laziness that afflicts many young bards.

Producer Liam Watson, known for helming the White Stripes’ “Elephant,” helps Long find a sound that’s redolent of many classic folk-rock recordings as well as contemporaries like Damien Rice and Mumford & Sons. To become a great songwriter, Long still needs to feel the shock of an encounter like the one Dylan felt confronting the African American civil rights movement. He’s obviously ready for that.

—Ann Powers

Bobby Long
“A Winter Tale”
(ATO)
Two and a half stars (Out of four)

It’s never easy to be subtle within the context of popular music. The crowd doesn’t want it; give them flash and flesh and a sugar overdose. For singer-songwriters, flash equals confession or florid imagery: paperback poetry, easy to grasp. Trying something harder may prove unrewarding.

John Vanderslice, the singer-songwriter and producer whose San Francisco studio Tiny Telephone is an indie pop mecca, makes subtle music that can be a bit off-putting. He’s a minimalist, in the literary rather than the musical sense; his spare melodies and carefully contained rhythms combine with scenes rich in imagery but deliberately short on elaboration. The emotion that seeps through his gently disturbing tales can be hard to track: What’s motivating the fear he communicates? What supports the love? The listener’s reward comes in doing the work of drawing her own conclusions.

“White Wilderness” makes that process engaging in ways that are new, though not necessarily easier. Instead of his usual electronically enhanced folk rock, Vanderslice turned to the composer Minna Choi and her Magik Magik Orchestra to complete the nine songs on this 31-minute release.

The semi-classical setting removes some of Vanderslice’s usual tricks — he can’t kick up the energy with a backbeat or use effects to enhance his gentle vocals. Choi’s arrangements carry the songs somewhere else, away from the tension-release of rock and into the more contemplative realm of art song.

Daniel Bejar forces listeners to hear Kara Walker's words from a different angle on ‘Suicide Demo for Kara Walker.'

Appropriation -- the act of making something your own by copying it -- has been a hot topic in the art world at least since Andy Warhol first closely examined the can that contained his lunch. It's become increasingly relevant in popular music circles too, leading to big questions about intellectual property and the nature of originality.

“Suicide Demo for Kara Walker” employs appropriation in fascinating ways. It's on “Kaputt,” the new album from Vancouver-based bard Daniel Bejar's semi-solo project, Destroyer. “Kaputt” rethinks Destroyer's noisy, rococo indie rock within the startling context of New Romantic smooth jazz, in the process changing the meaning of clichés like “mellow” and “art rock.”

All the songs on “Kaputt” pose this challenge, but “Suicide Demo” goes furthest by featuring lyrics Bejar cut up from text-filled cue cards sent to him by the fine artist Kara Walker. Walker herself is an appropriation genius, known for work that fearlessly interrogates the deep history of African American and female oppression through refashioned imagery. Singing loaded phrases like “Seen you consorting with your Invisible Manhole” or “Don't talk about the South, she said,” in his quavery Canadian tenor, Bejar doesn't become Walker but forces the listener to hear her words in a different voice, from a different angle. Disturbing and illuminating, “Suicide Demo” leads us somewhere new.

The Internet's instant responders sighed with contentment but did not experience hysteria when the Los Angeles Times revealed the lineup for this year's Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival late Tuesday. The announcement silenced the din of whispers that builds excitement for the April event -- a rumor mill that this year featured talk of the Rolling Stones headlining, Daft Punk returning and Lady Gaga luring her fan army of "little monsters" to the Polo Grounds.

These tantalizing possibilities were left unfilfilled in the wake of worthy but more predictable headliners, many of whom have made big impressions at the festival before. The Arcade Fire is finally claiming the Saturday night anchor position that's been its destiny since the band's thrilling sunset set in 2005, and the Kings of Leon move up from the side stage the band burned down in 2007. New York's Strokes, finally reunited, can wow the kids too young to have seen them in 2002. Kanye West, who played Coachella in 2006, adds another notch to a designer belt already marked by performances at outdoor festivals Sasquatch (2005; he slayed) and Bonnaroo (2008; he flopped).

A grumbler could go on. Duran Duran will surely entertain in the big legacy-act slot, but the New Romantic royals have been back for a while, no news there. PJ Harvey's decision to grace the festival after a rumored multi-year courtship will surely result in fireworks -- the band's February release, "Let England Shake," is a killer of an album -- but it's hard to imagine Polly Harvey cutting a more stunning figure than she did in her Victorian finery during her 2007 White Chalk tour. And the overwrought "whoas" issuing forth from certain indie palaces about the reunion of the Toronto-based synth-punk duo Death From Above 1979 seem to be overplaying a marginal event in the absence of more significant ones. 

What this year's Coachella line-up really does is thoroughly smack down the argument that a major music fest should stake its fortune on once-in-a-lifetime moments. Below the headliners, the weekend's bill unfolds impressively, containing a huge percentage of the artists earning accolades and buzz on the capricious cutting edge of pop.

“Sell yourself, don’t be a fool!” gurgles Matt Shultz, the wiggly frontman for Cage the Elephant, midway through the young Kentucky-bred band’s second album. He’s yelling at the hipsters and fakes whose convolutions confuse and upset him, but he’s surely also offering himself a warning.

Having gained notoriety a couple of years back for intense live shows and memorable singles like 2008’s slouchy, sexy “Ain’t No Rest for the Wicked,” Shultz and his pals, including brother Brad on guitar and secret weapon Daniel Tichenor on bass, stand at a crucial juncture. Can Cage the Elephant survive the scrutiny of jaded aficionados who call its drum kit-toppling yet sweet-toothed approach to guitar bashery nothing but a rehash of flannel rock? This set of ripping rave-ups and effortlessly tasty singalongs answers YES, in all caps.

The band’s influences are obvious. Songs like “Aberdeen,” a nod to Kurt Cobain’s hometown, and the shameless Pixies rewrite “Around My Head” trash and lovingly refashion those sources the way kids take apart their toys during the winter holidays. It helps that these pilferers have great taste. They run like rabbits from the stultifying bottom end of grunge, instead honoring what was hot and sweet about ‘90s rock: the raucousness of its hooks and the accessibility of its noise.

The twang in Shultz’s voice and in Lincoln Parish’s lead guitar betrays the band’s Southern influence. Like the Kings of Leon, Cage the Elephant gains benefits from being rooted in a region where plain old rock still has wide appeal. There’s no pretentiousness to this band, and no tricks in the clean production by versatile Nashville vet Jay Joyce. And though Shultz’s lyrics betray much self-doubt, his wildfire yelp overcomes it. When he sings about a girl who holds “her dirty hands over the flame,” yeah, he’s singing about a lost love, but he’s also singing to himself. The flame is rock and roll, unquenchable.

—Ann Powers

Cage the Elephant
“Thank You Happy Birthday”
Jive/RED Records
Three stars (Out of four)

[Updated: In the original version of this review, Matt Shultz's name was misspelled and Daniel Tichenor was misidentified as Brad Tichenor. Also, the song "Around My Head" was mistakenly titled as "Paper Cut (Walk Around My Head)."]

If one were to list the breakout hits of the last two years, a few songs would rise to the top: the massive chart killers of Lady Gaga ("Alejandro," "Bad Romance," "Poker Face"), Eminem's "Love the Way You Lie," Cee Lo Green's "Forget You" and B.o.B.'s "Nothin' on You" and "Airplanes," among others.

Those songs have one thing in common -- well, at least one we're interested in right now: Three of the hitmakers responsible for them will take part in the first Los Angeles Times Music Producers Roundtable on Saturday at the Grammy Museum at L.A. Live. Just in time for the Grammys, producers Alex Da Kid (Eminem, B.o.B.), Ari Levine of the Smeezingtons (Cee Lo Green, Bruno Mars) and RedOne (Lady Gaga)  -- all of whose songs have been nominated this year -- will sit down with Los Angeles Times pop music critic Ann Powers for an hour-long conversation about their work, today's trends in music and the business of hitmaking.

Although producers are by definition the silent partners in the creative process, their role in guiding the landscape of popular music is crucial, and while the artists get their kudos onstage during performances, the producers remain in their windowless recording studios creating the magic. The Los Angeles Times Music Producers Roundtable will offer a rare opportunity for these artists to chime in on the art of the hit song in 2011.

The event is free to the public, but reservations are required. To learn more about getting a ticket, check out the announcement at the Awards Tracker blog.

-- Randall Roberts

Photo: Alex Da Kid. Credit: Natty Photo.

Country music was born of hard-luck lives and heartbreak, with its singers as raw and roughed up as the songs. Its early singers were the stuff of legends — unashamed of humble beginnings, dogged by tragedy, uneasy with fame, often in search of redemption. The stories captured the imagination of Hollywood, with filmmakers turning them into classics — and clunkers (“Rhinestone,” anyone?). It is the wail of the American heartland that appeals, and the plain-spoken lyrics make for easy plot points — “Help me make it through the night,” “She's actin' single, I'm drinkin' doubles,” “Take this job and shove it,” “D-I-V-O-R-C-E.”

The best scripts that emerged cut across social and economic lines, and the music was always there when the words failed. “Country Strong” is the latest to join that rich tradition, with Gwyneth Paltrow starring as a broken singer-songwriter in search of a little saving grace. The film is expanding into theaters around the country this week, so Times pop music critic Ann Powers and Times film critic Betsy Sharkey were asked to pick their four favorites from the past for a gallery available at left.

It was mostly a peaceable process, except when it came to “Coal Miner's Daughter.” Whether it was graciousness or grit that won the day, we'll never tell.

— Ann Powers and Betsy Sharkey

Top photo: Gwyneth Paltrow in "Country Strong." Credit: Scott Garfield /Sony-Screen Gems.

Bottom photo: Ronee Blakley and Henry Gibson in Robert Altman's "Nashville." Credit: Paramount Pictures.

The dawn of 2011 held special promise, it seemed, for fans of Justin Timberlake's music. Though the nearly thirtysomething star recently told Times reporter Chris Lee that he's taking a break from music to pursue the presumably more serious goal of Oscar-nabbing, a shiny new sign to the contrary popped up late last week, in the form of a leaked new song, the frenetically finger-poppin' "Take You Down."

JT devotees greeted the song, supposedly produced by JT's old pals the Neptunes, with cautious excitement. Some bloggers noted that the vocals didn't really live up to the high standards of the falsetto-wielding future action hero, and most sources threw around the word "demo" to describe the song, which has a rump-shaking beat and some cute vocal effects, but doesn't exactly vault into the stratosphere.

Still, some of us were fooled. Such is the hunger for new material from the guy who's played a crucial role in helping 21st-century teen pop grow up.