ON the day of cult folk queen Vashti Bunyan’s concert at The Band Room, Low Mill, last Saturday, one family’s discussion involved a teenage contribution along the lines of “no one old should write songs”.

The reasoning was that musicians write better songs or sing better when they are young. Or as Ray Davies, of The Kinks, put it, they were the days when he wrote songs rather than having to think about writing songs.

Vashti Bunyan is 69; she has just released her third and final album, a thing of beauty, insight and experience that shoots the teen’s theory out of the water, although that is rather too violent an image for a gossamer musician whose songs are so gentle.

Now, let’s add two croaky, smoky, burnished old voices to the debate; two women who have lived a lot, learned even more and now pass on that bittersweet wisdom to us. Step forward, Louisiana’s three-time Grammy Award winner Lucinda Williams, aged 61, with her most ambitious record to date, her first double album, all 20 songs of it. Step back into the spotlight, Sixties pop darling turned Marlene Dietrich-style elder stateswoman, Marianne Faithfull, aged 67, on the 50th anniversary of As Tears Go By.

Williams gave an erratic, misjudged performance at the Grand Opera House, York, in June 2013 but in among the reckless ruining of the night’s mood she premiered glorious new songs destined for Down Where The Spirit Meets The Bone, a line taken from her musical rendition of her poet father’s work Compassion. Burning her way through rock, folk, blues and country , she defines the state and heart of America in the company of such guests as Bill Frisell, Tony Joe White, Pete Thomas and Ian McLagan, but it is Williams who rules all she surveys with her combustible disdain and hope for better days.

Faithfull is as much performance artist as singer, her voice a haze of smoke inside a haze of cigarette smoke as she recalls Weimar cabaret and her Broken English peak with a guest list that would make a magnificently decadent party: Nick Cave and Warren Ellis of The Bad Seeds; Ed Harcourt; Steve Earle; Brian Eno; Anna Calvi; Roger Waters; Portishead’s Adrian Utley. Imagine Grace Jones’s Nightclubbing revamped, as the years go by, and you have the essence of 2014 Marianne, social diarist and hostess.