Jack White (the former John Anthony Gillis) was born in Detroit and now lives in Nashville, a geographical progression you can hear in his music. He loves rude, dirty rock'n'roll but also has a fine instinct for country music, both of which tendencies are splurged all over this consistently inspired album (his second solo venture and the follow-up to 2012's Blunderbuss).

There's a "foreword" which accompanies the new Taylor Swift album – because it's not enough for the one-time Nashville starlet gone full New York pop star merely to create physical objects for the digital age: she also has to give them forewords – which says that these songs that were "once about my life" are "now about yours". It's for this reason that those articles that list the romantic encounters claimed to have inspired every song Swift has written since 2010's "Dear John" onwards do her an incredible disservice: the gossip column inches are irrelevant.

Perhaps capitalizing on the much-lauded success of the current television series of the same name starring Hayden Panettiere, Robert Altman’s Nashville (1975) is now out on DVD. Both film and TV show merge music and drama in the same way and both detail the social and political issues constantly swirling around country music’s hometown. But that’s where the similarities end.

Since Nashville and country music are one giant soap opera, it's amazing nobody turned Tennessee's Music City into a TV series before. No matter. Here we are with series two, and it's as deliriously cheesy and melodramatic as ever.

Eddie Noack: Psycho – The K-Ark and Allstar Recordings 1962–69

Nashville’s singer, songwriter, luthier and hard liver Guy Clark delivered one of the best country albums of the Noughties, 2009’s Somedays the Song Writes You. Sporting the likes of "Hemingway’s Whiskey", "The Guitar" and "Maybe I Can Paint Over That", it ranked with the best he’s done. Four years later, the world must be a darker place for Clark following the death of his wife Suzanne. Nor is he well enough to tour. We’ll not get the chance to see him in the UK again. And that, considering the strength of these new songs, is enough to make you weep.

A renaissance man from Texas? Hell yeah. Loosely pegged as "country singer" when he struck out for Nashville in the late Seventies, where he survived on a series of odd jobs before landing himself a songwriting job with a music publisher, the mature Steve Earle has blossomed creatively in all directions. Were he to use business cards, which I can't imagine somehow, he could justifiably bill himself as singer, songwriter, actor, playwright, novelist and political activist.

She has yet to hit the second half of her twenties, but Caitlin Rose already has a voice to melt the heart of the most casual listener. While her pedigree - Nashville-born daughter of a Grammy-winning songwriter - screams country starlet, Rose’s vocal is instead the rich, melodic croon to match the torch singer coyness of the pose she pulls on the cover art to her second album.

Usually that “similarity to persons living or dead is purely coincidental” note at the end of a broadcast is a mere formality - but I can’t have been the only person to react with a start when a trio of shady record company execs referred to Juliette Barnes, Hayden Panettiere’s perky blonde future of country music, as “the number one crossover artist in the country”.

In a members-only bowling club, down a side street in a residential part of Glasgow I'd never visited before last night, Texan fiddle-player and songwriter Amanda Shires stood wearing the most magnificent pair of cowboy boots I had ever seen.