J. Cole

“2014 FOREST HILLS DRIVE”

Roc Nation/Columbia Records

In an age of vicarious experience, when nearly anything can be consumed via someone else’s tweets, J. Cole believes in the value of physical proximity.

The rapper was one of the few boldface names to appear at the protests that broke out over the summer in Ferguson, Missouri, after a police officer killed an unarmed black 18-year-old. He turned up again in New York City, where he was photographed taking part in a demonstration against a grand jury’s decision not to indict a police officer in the choking death of Eric Garner.

“2014 Forest Hills Drive,” Cole’s third major-label disc, is thick with the residue of these immersions. Even when he’s drawing on his own experiences — the album’s title refers to the address of his childhood home — he exercises an observational acuity that suggests how much noticing he’s been doing lately.

In one track with an unprintable title and a warmly soulful beat he produced himself, Cole recounts being propositioned by a girl in his high school math class.

Yet the song isn’t a boast about his irresistibility (or isn’t entirely that): After acknowledging he was a virgin at the time, he moves step-by-step through the ensuing rendezvous, pointing out all the ways he concealed his nervousness with braggadocio. It’s surgical in its precision, and as moving as it is funny.

“Apparently,” with a piano-based arrangement that recalls Elton John’s “Bennie and the Jets,” is similarly unsparing as Cole describes how he was enjoying himself as a college kid in New York while his mother was being foreclosed upon back on Forest Hills Drive.

As potent as his self-evisceration can be, Cole comes most fully alive here when he turns outward.

“What’s the price for a black man life?” he asks in “January 28th,” one of several tracks that feel inspired by his fact-finding mission to Ferguson. “I checked the toe tag, not one zero in sight.”

In the growling “Fire Squad” he considers his place in the rap world — “Cole, you might be like the new Ice Cube meets the new Ice T” — then goes wider to ponder what rap means in a culture defined by white privilege.

“This year I’ll probably go to the awards show, dappered down / Watch Iggy win the Grammy as I try to crack a smile,” he says in a line that’s only more pointed now that Iggy Azalea, the blond-haired Australian rapper, was nominated last week for four Grammy Awards (including best rap album).

Later, “Love Yourz” takes up one of Cole’s favorite themes: his sense of conflict regarding the cushioned celebrity status that keeps threatening his connection to reality.

“No such thing as a life that’s better than yours,” he tells the listener, before insisting, “It’s beauty in the struggle, ugliness in the success.”

That idea isn’t an easy sell, as Cole himself goes on to admit. “I don’t mean no disrespect,” he says, addressing anyone “out there living in debt, cashing minimal checks.”

But then he delivers such a plain-spoken diagnosis of fame’s shortcomings — of the way it can distract the famous from the makings of true fulfillment — that you find yourself coming around to his rarefied perspective.

A deeply skilled empathizer, Cole can put you in his shoes too.

— Mikael Wood, Los Angeles Times

Willie Nelson And Sister Bobbie

“DECEMBER DAY: WILLIE’S STASH VOL. 1”

Legacy Recordings

Bobbie Nelson has been playing piano in her brother Willie’s band for more than 40 years, and they played together in other Texas bands before that. So these octogenarian siblings have forged a deep musical connection, and it’s put into even sharper relief than usual on “December Day.”

These 18 new performances are built around the eloquent interplay between Bobbie’s piano and Willie’s battered acoustic guitar, Trigger, with the main accompaniment coming from Mickey Raphael’s harmonica. If the song choices are familiar — the bulk comes from the Willie songbook, and he does all the singing — they exert a new, subtly powerful pull thanks to the Nelsons’ beautifully understated treatments.

While the siblings conjure a warmly intimate mood, the hour-long set would have benefited from more variety of tempo. After they open with a jaunty take on Irving Berlin’s “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” everything unfolds at a slow pace.

— Nick Cristiano, The Philadelphia Inquirer

She & Him

“CLASSICS”

Columbia Records

Zooey Deschanel and M. Ward, as She & Him, have always foregrounded their affection for the Brill Building era of early ’60s pop. Deschanel’s songs, throughout the duo’s three albums, revealed her expertise in crafting melodies that seem inevitable without sounding labored, and they showcased her guileless, inviting voice. For his part, Ward’s arrangements and guitar playing were smart and savvy but at the same time understated and judicious.

On “Classics,” the pair go all-in on nostalgia, as they did for their 2012 album “A Very She & Him Christmas.” With songs drawn mostly from the late ’50s but reaching back to the ’30s and with one outlier from the ’70s (Charles Aznavour’s “She,” which Ward sings), “Classics” is loving and lovely, if inconsistent. Deschanel fares better with light, airy tunes like “Oh No, Not My Baby” than with more thoughtful songs like “It’s Always You.”

Recorded live with string and brass sections, “Classics” is an homage to the sound of Dusty Springfield and Dionne Warwick, even when Deschanel and Ward appropriate songs done by Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong.

— Steve Klinge, The Philadelphia Inquirer