If you'd like Jack Johnson better if he weren't such a negative nellie, or if Colbie Caillat would be up your alley if it weren't for her gangsta existential angst, then Jason Mraz's "Love Is a Four-Letter Word" is the unremittingly sunny, determinedly stress-free album for you.

Easy listening doesn't get any easier than Mraz's fourth album. The sprightlier Mraz of the mid-2000s has been kidnapped and replaced by a guy who has no use for pop-rap vocal rhythms or silly wordplay.

Mraz was never exactly hard-boiled, even back in the days when he was trying to be funny, but "Love" is so single...

In 1989, Bonnie Raitt had a huge hit and subsequent Grammy sweep with the album “Nick of Time,” which movingly spoke to the ways that love can creep up and save a person in middle age.

Nearly a quarter-century later, on the terrific “Slipstream,” Raitt seems to have a different, somewhat more bemused perspective on love and/or aging, as if to address what happens when all those good things that arrived just in the nick of time disappear just as fatefully.

In the album-opening “Used to Rule the World" (written by Randall Bramlett), a bevy of has-beens consider their diminished place in the state of...

Dr. John was definitely in the right place at the right time when he agreed to let the Black Keys’ Dan Auerbach produce his new album, “Locked Down,” one of the giddiest experiences a serious rock fan could have this spring.

By “right place,” we don’t necessarily mean Bourbon Street. If you’re thinking this will be “a New Orleans album” in any of the usual senses -- even in any of the usual Dr. John senses -- you might be disappointed. The artist lesser known as Mac Rebennack doesn’t play acoustic piano on the album (or if he does, it’s virtually subliminal). So don’t expect a second of that distinct Tipitina vibe. 

And by “right time,...

On their fourth album, "Kids in the Street," the All-American Rejects sacrifice a lot of their youthful vigor and spunk for a newfound maturity and balladry. Whether that's been influenced more by actual growing up or having some success placing songs on movie soundtracks is anyone's guess.

Call it Goo Goo Dolls syndrome.

If you took the title of "Kids in the Street" to mean that the band would be acting like scrappy youths 13 years into their career, you'd be mistaken. Actually, the title track is one of those wistfully backward-looking reveries in which a singer waxes nostalgic for his younger...