Abigail Lapell is a singer feted and given awards in her homeland of Canada, but who has yet to reach far outside it. Folk is her metier but only insofar as it’s Joni Mitchell’s.

Five albums into her career, inspired by COVID lockdown-induced insomnia, she gives us a short set of lullabies from around the world, alongside a sole new song of her own. It is a hazily gentle and often lovely thing.

Back to Moon Beach is a collection of new, reworked and covered songs that feels like a gift from Kurt Vile for his fans to dissect. He jokingly refers to the EP, which is just under an hour long, as “a KV comp”, an appropriate description given the varied history of the tracks.

It’s not long before the first single “Another Good Year for the Roses” is momentarily forgotten in favour of Vile’s take on Bob Dylan’s Christmas song “It Must Be Santa”, which in turn is left behind for the reworked version of his 2022 track “Cool Water”.

This UK premiere of the award-winning, Dublin-born vocalist and composer Christine Tobin’s latest project, Returning Weather, presented an otherworldly ode to finding home – casting multiple perspectives on our yearning for connection and human warmth.

Cat Power, aka singer-songwriter Chan Marshall, is releasing her first live album – a recording of the faithful recreation of Bob Dylan’s infamous gig of 1966, played in November 2022 at the Royal Albert Hall.

It was more than a decade ago when I first saw Rachel Sermanni in concert, in the upstairs room at The Old Queen’s Head in Islington, London, for a Nest Collective night. She had yet to release her debut, 2012’s Under Mountains, but was already making an impact as a stage performer.

The cows are scattered across the mountains. Without scrambling up the slopes, the only way to summon them is to call. Unni Løvlid is beckoning them. Instead of standing outdoors she is in the medieval Ullensvang Church, in the Norwegian village of Lofthus. She uses the interior of a grand piano to get the necessary resonance, the echo which distant animals would hear.

Kristin Hersh’s voice, it transpires, is ageless. In the 80s when Throwing Muses broke through, she hit a particular combination of tones – blurring boundaries between harsh and smooth, melodic and discordant, trad and weird – that became vastly influential.

Along with the likes of Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon and Pixies’s Kim Deal, she not only reconfigured the sense of what the female voice was in rock music, but helped codify singing styles for men and women vocalists in grunge and alt-rock ever after.

Between the late 1950s and around 1971, Robert “Mack” McCormick (1930–2015) travelled through his base-state Texas, Alabama, Mississippi, west Louisiana and parts of Arkansas and Oklahoma looking for musicians to record. It wasn’t a random process: he covered 700 counties using a grid system, so nothing would be missed. As well as tapes, he made lists, filled notebooks and took photos. He kept everything.

Ruarri Joseph is not a household name but in a Sliding Doors scenario, he might have been. Scottish, raised in New Zealand, and based in Cornwall, he signed to Atlantic in 2007, and had the same management as Damien Rice and David Gray.

It’s 15 years since Judy Collins last stepped out at the Cambridge Folk Festival. She was a mere 68 then and, in the time since, little has changed except her hair, the famous rock-star mane lopped so that she now resembles the cover of those classic early Sixties’ albums.