Back in 2001, Toronto-based singer-songwriter Tamara Williamson put her then-latest album, The Arms Of Ed, on her website in MP3 form as a free download. In the accompanying note, she wrote that music wasn’t where she made her money anyways; that’s what gardening was for. After about a year, the album disappeared again, but between the free download and her work with King Cobb Steelie and Microbunny at about the same time, she probably gained quite a few fans.

Williamson’s career has been, like so many others, a case study of how to fly under the radar. After the British-born Williamson moved to Canada, she joined up with Mrs. Torrance, signed to ViK Records, and put out a couple of releases. What little attentione they got branded them as art-rock, a sufficiently vague label that got them nowhere, and shortly after the release of Porn the band disappeared. Done with record label dealings for the time being, Williamson put together an album of spare, dreamy demoes and passed them around to a couple of producers. Without really intending to, she found herself putting out the album, Nightmare On Queen Street.

Ever since, Williamson has been refining her sound, always retaining its dreamlike qualities even as she plunges occasionally into very downbeat territory musically. Almost criminally underappreciated except for a fan base cultivated through live shows and residency gigs at Toronto bars and clubs, it nevertheless seems that Williamson is perfectly happy to continue making her money from gardening instead of from her music.

As one of K Records’ bedroom-pop mainstays throughout much of the 90s, Lois Maffeo earned herself quite the reputation in the Pacific Northwest for her brand of lo-fi, low key indie pop. Some of Maffeo’s collaborators have seen far more exposure than her, though; longtime musical partner Brendan Canty is Fugazi’s drummer, and she shares both a spiritual link and a duet with the late Elliott Smith.

By the time Maffeo took a break from recording in 1996, the lo-fi movement had begun to run out of steam. The wide-ranging genre had given bands like Sebadoh and Guided By Voices some brief radio airplay, but like so many other trends, lo-fi eventually sunk bank to the depths of college radio from whence it came, and people moved on. When Maffeo resurfaced with 2000’s The Union Themes, this time putting Canty’s name on the album as well, she brought with her a more fully-formed musical sensibility.

Even more so than her last album for K, 1996’s Infinity Plus, Maffeo augmented the simple formula of girl + guitar with grander arrangements that put more emphasis on percussion and added piano to the mix. Canty’s guitar playing, which had added texture to older songs like Bet The Sky’s “Transatlantic Telephone Call,” is given more of the spotlight as well. The end result is best described as Lois Maffeo’s adult album: the songwriting’s even better, and everything from the arrangements to the production values lends a sense of maturity to the proceedings. And while the rough edges of her earlier work is occasionally missed, it’s just as easy to forget she ever recorded anything but beautiful, accomplished chamber-pop albums.

Thanks to the success of O Brother, Where Art Thou? Gillian Welch is practically a household name. What those people might not know is that ever since the Coen Brothers’ movie, Welch has been playing more upbeat material as well; it’s possible that too much of George Clooney mugging along with “Man Of Constant Sorrow” will do that to anyone. Time (The Revelator) was Welch’s first album after O Brother, and while the songs still pass by at a languid, unhurried pace, it’s not the dark and mournful album that Hell Among The Yearlings and Revival were.

For quite a while, Welch and partner in crime T-Bone Burnett flew under the country radar; during the New Country wave of the early and mid-90s, people like Welch were seen as aping a style whose time had long since passed. Today, it’s clear that Welch isn’t a mere imitator, and suddenly the pop-oriented sound of new country has fallen into steep decline. Now CMT plays BBC documentaries about the success of one Gillian Welch, and the T-Bone Burnett-guided soundtrack to O Brother, Where Art Thou? is a bestseller.

We’ve turned the corner. The months of September through December are like an extended twilight; patio season’s coming to a close, the leaves are quickly turning colour, and before long the trees will be bare. It’s like Mother Nature gives up on the northern hemisphere for a spell; no wonder all the sad songs work better when it’s November.

There’s something very comforting about the change in the seasons, like the little kid who, try as they might, finds themselves at the end of August tired of playing outside and ready for school. Songs like this are just as much a part of autumn as the leaves changing colour, the shades of regret and longing a perfect antidote to too much summer sun.