ONE was facing death, the other is fired up by political anger and each knows how to inhabit a song.

It is difficult to imagine an album with a greater sense of mortality than American V, recorded as it was when Cash was wheelchair-bound and his health was failing dramatically.

Such circumstances give this album lasting power and humanity, and it's a hard-hearted listener who remains unmoved while Cash croaks against the dying light.

His performance is particularly affecting on Like The 309, the last song he wrote and like his first recorded single, Hey Porter a train song, only this time the old loco is chugging on a final journey.

Gordon Lightfoot's If You Could Read My Mind is given a lovely treatment, rendered more powerful still by Cash's cracked voice, while Springsteen's Further On (Up The Road) also takes on fresh potency.

Few albums in recent years can have held such an acute sense of a man facing up to his fate, and accepting what's to come with the battered grace of a much-lived life, and, for all that, buoyed by the swell of optimism. The results are more positive than gloomy.

Steve Earle takes everything back to voice and acoustic guitar, with Dylan-style harmonica thrown in, on an engaging live album recorded last year. This is Earle the man of protest, blasting against his president in songs such as Rich Man's War, Revolution Starts Now and the quietly magnificent Christmas In Washington.

There is fun, too, with a lively telling of Condi Condi, which sounds so much better live. Stripped and bare, these songs acquire a new immediacy, with Earle showing that he knows how to make a musical and a political impact.