While Elton John was picking up another bauble and tinkling the ivories in Paris, the world’s other Piano Man was heading to London and Wembley, where he last played three years ago. It was Billy Joel’s only British gig in a stadium tour that kicked off in Orlando in January and which saw him recently notch up his one-hundredth Madison Square Garden concert – as artist-in-residence he’s been playing one concert a month there since 2014.

Anyone familiar with Calexico and Iron & Wine will be unsurprised by Years to Burn. The 32-minute album (one track of which is a short instrumental) showcases lilting, mid-paced, reflective, country tinged and acoustic-bedded songs fleshed out with piano and Mexican-styled brass.

Only those who’ve just popped in from an early 20^th century Tennessee cotton field will have recently observed more pairs of dungarees in one place than at Red Rooster. It’s a festival that prides itself on a rich diet of Americana alongside a defiantly retro aesthetic.

Was it imagination or did The Waterboys’ audience at London’s Roundhouse, invited to sing along to “The Nearest Thing to Hip”, really sing extra-loud and lustily on the line “in this shithole”?

Prufrock might have measured his life in coffee spoons but for many of us it’s rock albums, the money to buy them way back when scrabbled together from Saturday jobs and student grants  –  remember them?

Better Oblivion Community Center may be a supergroup of sorts, but the name still draws less recognition that its members (Phoebe Bridgers and Conor Oberst from Bright Eyes). Maybe it’s just too complicated to remember, because a packed Shepherd’s Bush Empire proved the band’s wide appeal – lairy lads and muso pensioners, side-by-side for a night of charm and angst.

Torso Hell tells the story of an American soldier whose limbs were blown off in Vietnam. Amazingly, he and his buddies survived, and in the ensuing medical chaos his arms and legs were re-attached to them rather than him. The narrator says “At the hospital, it’s so crazy and confused that when these guys come in, the doctors and nurses don’t know what from what … they just start sewing. The main guy stays a torso, but they put his arms and legs back on the other guys.

There's a remarkable lightness to the way Norah Jones has glid through her career.

Guy Clark is among the favourite songwriters of Bob Dylan, a Grammy-winning giant of the so-called outlaw country music movement who lived hard and died of lymphoma in 2016.

In one of the award-winning club’s forays from its Camden Town home, Green Note welcomed International Women’s Day with a special one-off concert exploring and celebrating the many ages and stages of being a woman. Three generations of musicians were on stage at North London’s JW3.