Banbury has a cross, a cake and a motorway junction. It has never had a songwriter quite like this. Music by Jeremy, a solo artist who makes records at weekends while his partner chooses her shoes, has reached the third instalment of a 24-track autobiography. In Side Three, the memoir stops studying its own reflection and goes to the window to look at the weather.

Heartbreak songs usually shout. The tradition runs from the torch singer to the stadium balladeer, and it assumes that grief must be loud to be believed. Brandes goes the other way. "Behind Your Eyes" is a murmur, a confidence passed across a kitchen table late at night, and it has more force than most of its bigger-voiced rivals.

There is a certain kind of pop song that arrives with a manifesto, a concept album's worth of gravitas and a press release as thick as a telephone directory. "Sunrise State of Mind" is not that song. It is built, by the artist's own admission, on two simple chords, and it is all the better for it. In an age of over-egged production and under-cooked ideas, Dave Hill Jr. has done something quietly radical: he has written a song about feeling good, and made it sound like he means it.

Bowie decamped to Berlin and Reed claimed New York, while INXS took themselves to Prague to cut "Never Tear Us Apart". Now a schoolteacher from Vila Nova de Gaia has followed them there, and has come home with a single that deserves a good deal more attention than a bedroom-recorded release usually gets.

Twenty-two albums in, a songwriter either repeats himself into oblivion or finds a way to make repetition itself the joke. Hersey has chosen the latter path, and *Quixote* is the sound of a man who has finally admitted that the windmill was never going to fall, and decided to enjoy the tilting anyway.

A cover version can so easily become an exhumation — reverent, embalmed, drained of the pulse that made the original worth stealing in the first place. Rusty Reid's take on "I Can See Clearly Now" commits no such crime. What he's done, cannily, is resist the urge to reinvent, and in doing so he's pulled off something far harder than reinvention: he's made an over-familiar song feel newly inhabited.

Songwriters who dare to rhyme "colonial" with anything at all deserve applause before the needle even drops, and Last Night Watchman — the recording alias of a Herefordshire-based veteran of Birmingham's indie underground — clears that bar and keeps climbing. *Old Blighty*, the title track and centrepiece of this new EP, takes its cue from the toppling of Edward Colston's statue in Bristol, and turns a moment of street theatre into something far more durable: a genuinely unsettled meditation on inheritance, guilt and the stories a nation tells itself to sleep at night.

Songwriting has a lousy track record when it comes to loss. Most who attempt it either drown the thing in strings until it becomes a funeral parlour advert, or they flinch at the last second and reach for a platitude instead of a truth. Scott Lowder does neither. "Ghost of You" is a song that had the patience to wait a decade for its author to be ready to record it properly, and that patience is audible in every bar.

Grief has a sound, and so does the slow climb out of it, and Eric David Kendall — the man behind the one-artist project BUSKING AROUND — has spent his career learning to score both. "Hello My Dear" opens on the former: a piano figure that sits low and unhurried, percussion that feels more like a pulse than a beat, strings held back like breath before a confession. It is the sound of a room with the curtains drawn. And then, patiently, deliberately, Kendall lets the light in.

There is a particular species of American rock record that only reveals itself fully once you stop expecting it to behave — and "Losing (The Only Game In Town)," the new single from Minnesota's The Scarlet Goodbye, is very much one of those records. It arrives less like a song than a conversation between two old friends who've decided, after decades of separate careers, to see what happens when they finally sit in the same room with their guitars pointed at each other.