Glad Rag Doll features exactly the same producer and rhythm section as the Lisa Marie Presley album, but to different ends.

Jack Kerouac's cult novel On the Road, first published in 1957, has sold more than 10 million copies but has never before been filmed. After watching this Walter Salles-directed adaptation, you begin to understand why. The very term "cult novel" seems to include within it a warning to film-makers: don't go there. And the warning is always ignored. No doubt the book will still have many eager readers to come, but it's hard not to feel that this film will have chipped away some of its cultish glamour. The problem with "the romance of the road" is that so many movies in the last 40 years have gone there, most of them chasing the tail exhaust of Easy Rider in 1969. This adaptation, however faithful it may be to the book, looks awfully tame in 2012.

A standout performer at last year's Rain Dogs Revisited tribute to Tom Waits at the Barbican, Camille O'Sullivan is an ingenious interpreter of bold material on this studio debut.

Voice, piano, autoharp, synth bleeps... But it's the voice you listen to.

This New Zealander's second album is a rattling, twanging, guitar-thumping celebration of the inebriated underdog as tragicomic hero.

Old-fashioned musicianly blues-rock, as practised by lank-haired individuals around the turn of the 1970s, with some of the virtuosity of Led Zeppelin but a fraction of the imagination. 

Fresh-faced they may be, but new talents are turning to the songs of bygone eras.

Who lives in a house like this? There's dirty laundry all over the floor, piles of records strewn around, life drawings hanging in the bathroom and war medals displayed on the walls. Why, it's Pete Doherty, of course, the free-spirited scamp. In a video recorded for NME's website, the 33-year-old musician gives viewers a tour of his cramped Paris apartment.

Remember Once, the charming, low-budget film about an Irish busker and a Czech cleaner who meet and make beautiful music together?

In their determination to go out on any limb, regardless of taste or safety, Lazarus and the Plane Crash – a collaboration between Guillotines singer Joe Coles and Stephen Coates, grey eminence behind The Real Tuesday Weld – display the kind of risk-taking absent from The Maccabees' album.

For a while, real stardom seemed to beckon Ed Harcourt. His debut EP in 2000, Maplewood, introduced a Tom Waits-worshipping, 23-year-old prodigy.

Ever since his elaboration of a tramp’s rendition of ‘Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet’, Gavin Bryars has been a master of the re-use of what one might call ‘musiques trouvees’, sometimes ranging as far as Japanese gagaku.

If Coldplay are a music critic's kryptonite, then Tom Waits is critical catnip, applauded as the true one-off he undoubtedly is even when his music sounds like sandpaper being scratched over dropping dustbin lids.

Joe Henry uses T-Bone Burnett's favoured drummer Jay Bellerose on his latest album, along with Americana stalwarts like guitarist Marc Ribot and bassist David Piltch.