Peter Ostroushko, Coming Down From Red Lodge

Regular listeners to A Prairie Home Companion might find these songs familiar. A frequent guest and onetime music director on the show, multi-instrumentalist maestro Ostroushko wrote the songs on Red Lodge as a challenge to himself to fill a five-week stint last March with entirely new work. The 10 songs here reflect the range of his compositional skill, hitting blues, bluegrass, and Celtic with equal aplomb. He covers a comparable emotional terrain—sly swagger in “Topanga Canyon Strut,” high-stepping ebullience on the title track, the meditative mourning in his September 11 memorial that closes the album.