“Thank you for waiting. I know some of you have been waiting a long time – about seven years – but it takes me a while to get things done.” Thus did singer/songwriter Hayley Willis greet the audience at her return to active service. Two Willis albums have bookended that seven-year period: 2003's acclaimed Come Get Some, her debut for 679/XL, and its excellent follow-up, Uncle Treacle, released on 4 October on her own Cripple Creek label, for which last night's performance acted as a launch party.

When the moment finally arrives for the Great Rock Reckoning, it’s hard to say where Crowded House will figure. There was a time, around 1993, when they looked like heirs apparent to U2 and R.E.M., ready to make the step-change up to the out-of-town sheds and the weekend fan-boys. They broke up rather than have to grasp that particular nettle, and the moment duly passed.

So anyway, when I told my three teenagers that I was off to see Randy Newman, there was a collective yawn and a mild snort of derision, which (and I think I know them well enough to interpret their snorts of derision) said, in effect, “Well, he’s just some crumbly guy who writes sweet songs for Toy Story.

One girl can hit a high C, and how; the other would surely melt the iciest-hearted in Rodgers and Hammerstein torchsongs. That's Roberta Alexander, on the evidence of her "Somewhere" last night. Together with classy lyric-coloratura Claron McFadden, the beaming high Cs girl, and sophisticated pianist-animateuse Reinild Mees, she ran the gamut of Bernstein's song-and-dance cornucopia. With such physical ease and high spirits from these total artists, even the occasional archness in Lenny's heart-on-sleeve songbook passed with a relaxed sense of fun.

To be born into the extraordinary Wainwright dynasty is to be born onstage, and Rufus has seized his birthright in a giant bear-hug. Mere weeks after the death of his mother, Kate McGarrigle, from cancer in January, the lanky, somewhat Heathcliff-like Rufus was back on the campaign trail with throttles wide open. In the pipeline for early April are his new album, All Days Are Nights: Songs for Lulu, and a new production of his opera Prima Donna at Sadler's Wells.

Commissioned by Josef Weinberger Ltd on the occasion of Stephen Sondheim’s 80th birthday today, In Good Company is a unique three-part collage of intimate conversations I have had with some of Sondheim’s closest colleagues and collaborators.

If music writers love to place artists in genres, it is a more-than-usually fruitless task with Magnetic Fields, the brainchild of “composer, multi-instrumentalist and bubblegum purist” Stephin Merritt. Many people discovered Magnetic Fields (named after the surrealist André Breton’s novel Les Champs Magnetiques) with their 3-CD box set 69 Songs, which was released in 1999. The titles themselves suggested some of his musical playgrounds, such as “Punk Love”, “Love is Like Jazz” or “World Love”. Others referred sometimes obliquely to Billie Holliday, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, Fleetwood Mac or Irving Berlin. Merritt said that the album “was not remotely an album about love. It’s an album about love songs, which are very far away from anything to do with love”.