I’ve always found that the music I love best, the music that stays with me through the years, is music that takes a little time to warm to. Songs that are instantaneously ingratiating are often quick to pale into boredom, but those complex enough to be initially off-putting reveal their appeal on third or fourth or fifth listen and become long-term infatuations.

Unfortunately, my life as a working parent these days does not leave as much room as it once had for third or fourth or fifth listens. And so sometimes I’ll check out a new band’s music and, if my auditory fancy is not instantly seized, I’ll put the CD or the files aside for months, even years. Frequently, this means I’ll miss the boat for an unconscionable length of time.

I certainly missed The Blueberry Boat. This album by the Fiery Furnaces was an indie-critical sensation when it came out in 2004. But the spectral nautical rambling of the album’s 10-minute opener, “Quay Cur,” didn’t grab me quickly when I brought it home, so it languished at the bottom of my pile, and I am only falling in love with it now.

It’s a collection of long story-suites (the band’s brother-and-sister creators, Matthew and Eleanor Friedberger, have cited Who pop suites like “Rael” and “A Quick One While He’s Away” as influences) that hop restlessly from theme to theme, spitting off throwaway melodies and opaquely allusive, effusively articulate lyrics. The title track features an assault by pirates; “Chris Michaels” seems to tune onto the wavelength of a suburban gossip; “Mason City” takes snapshots of the 19th-century midwest from formal correspondence and railway company files; “Chief Inspector Blancheflower” seems to be a sort of Victorian policier unfolding in the mind of a bored typewriter-repairperson manque.

I hear fragments of everything from Phil Spector to Philip Glass in the mix; there are snarly-catchy guitar solos and even gospel flourishes (in the frantic “I Lost My Dog”). Some of Matthew Friedberger’s sound treatments hark back to the heyday of early Eno. (The fanfare at the start of “Mason City” sounds a lot like a sped-up outtake from Another Green World. And both Blueberry and Here Come the Warm Jets feature songs with “Paw-Paw” in their titles!) Other synthesizer flourishes fondly recall the bombast of the prog-rock era, though that label is one the Furnaces understandably do not embrace. One evening, when I turned up Blueberry Boat in my office, my wife shouted incredulously from the next room, “Wow — Emerson, Lake and Palmer?” Not exactly — but not crazy, either.

The followup to Blueberry, apparently a tribute to the Friedbergers’ grandmother titled Rehearsing My Choir, has gotten a colder critical reception. But before making up my own mind, I’m going to listen to it at least a half dozen times — as soon as I get the chance.

I schlepped through two hours of rush hour traffic last night to drive down to Saratoga and hear Richard Thompson play at the rustic, remote Villa Montalvo, a mansion in the Santa Cruz mountains converted into an arts center. It’s hard for me to believe it’s been almost ten years since I interviewed Thompson for the then new-born Salon; it’s almost as hard to believe that, this far into a career that stretches back to the late ’60s, he has continued to grow as a musician and songwriter.

Last night, he mixed up timeless, heartache-filled classics like “Genesis Hall,” “Down Where the Drunkards Roll,” and “The Great Valerio” with newer material split between boisterous upbeat love-songs (“Cooksferry Queen,” “Bathsheba Smiles”) and wry, punning novelties like a ditty in praise of Alexander Graham Bell (“Edison, he was a thief / And Tesla nuts beyond belief
/ But Alexander was a gent / So philanthropic, so well meant”).

One moment, he was playfully putting the lie to the old Dorothy Parkerism that “Guys don’t make passes at girls who wear glasses” with “I’ve Got the Hots for the Smarts,” a jazzy ode to the turn-on of intellectual dames (“I like a girl in satin / who talks dirty in Latin”). Then he turned around to look at the realm of the intellect from the perspective of a Taliban-style fundamentalist, who, in his post-9/11 portrait, “Outside of the Inside,” dismisses the entire record of human civilization: “Shakespeare, Isaac Newton / Small ideas for little boys / Adding to the senseless chatter / Adding to the background noise.”

At this stage of his musicianship, Thompson is entirely capable of impersonating an entire rock ensemble using one acoustic guitar; bass line, rhythm, melody and solo all somehow emerge from a single pair of hands playing a single instrument. His show is a remarkable thing, yet the little house at Montalvo still had empty seats. If there are any more of those, as this three-night engagement continues tonight and tomorrow night, you might want to grab them.

If you haven’t seen it already — it made the blogosphere rounds a month or two ago — They Might Be Giants’ “Bloodmobile” song and (as animated by Dave Logan) video is a thing of beauty. “A delivery service inside us!” For fans of “Why Does the Sun Shine?”, which definitely includes our household’s younger echelon.

Longtime readers here know of my enthusiasm for the music of the Mountain Goats. Their new album, The Sunset Tree, is out, and it’s extraordinary. Singer/songwriter John Darnielle gets directly autobiographical here; where his previous outing, We Shall All Be Healed, was a series of recollections and epitaphs for friends and acquaintances from time spent among doomed speed freaks, this one is about his own experiences trying to grow up in a house with a violent stepfather.

That of course makes it sound like the most tiresome sort of confessional singer-songwriting; but when you take this kind of autobiographical material and run it through the loom of the imagination rather than the mill of therapy, something different emerges. There’s poetry here, and exquisite music-making, and more than a little wry humor, and a sense that youthful pain remembered and sung about is better than youth simply forgotten.

And so we have songs like “This Year,” a beaten-down teenage boy’s answer to “I Will Survive” (“I am gonna make it through this year / IF IT KILLS ME”) set to an ostinato hook, and “Dance Music,” with a perky melody playing counterpoint to scenes of domestic mayhem, and “Up the Wolves’s” Romulus-and-Remus parable of growing up wild, and “Pale Green Things,” a delicate tune that close out the album on a note less of reconciliation than of simple witness.

There’s less of We Shall All Be Healed’s Velvets-derived rock, more cello and mandolin in the mix. Each song is memorable, the production (John Vanderslice) is autumnally intimate, the effect stunning. I’m tempted to say something like “abuse never sounded so good,” but rather than trivialize The Sunset Tree with that kind of throwaway line, I’ll just say how glad I am to have it in my ears and head.

(Amazon has a good interview with Darnielle, and streams four songs from the album. For more Goats detail, there’s Jim Fisher’s in-depth study.)

A little while ago someone posted to Metafilter a link to old live videos from 1981 of the Replacements singing a number of songs. I looked to see if “Johnny’s Gonna Die” was there, and it was.

The first Replacements album, 1981’s “Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take Out the Trash,” was an explosion of punk brattiness in ultra-short bursts. The band members were still basically kids, and a lot of their music was fun but, well, disposable, as the album title promises.

Nestled there at the very end of Side One, though, was this desolate ache of a song, and it’s still a heartbreaker. The music begins with a sarcastic nod to the Byrds’ “So You Wanna Be a Rock ‘n’ Roll Star” — a tongue-in-cheek vision to begin with, but the Replacements turn its rollicking bass line and chiming guitars into something hollow and stark. The lyrics simply declare the certain fate of a certain musician: Johnny Thunders was going to die. A decade later, he did. (Heroin will do that.) A few years later, so did Bob Stinson, the Replacements guitarist whose simple barren solos fill the song’s empty spaces. Watch him in that video, hammering on the high string.

From Elvis to Vicious to Cobain, self-destructive rock stars have cut a path across the decades that young musicians understandably find magnetic. Somehow, here at the very start of their career, the Replacements managed to stare down that whole bundle of mythology. When I saw the band play this song at a tiny club in Cambridge a few years after that video was recordered, I remember wondering about the snotty edge of “Johnny’s Gonna Die”: those “nah nah nahs,” like a schoolyard taunt, or the kiss-off in its closing “Bye bye.” Affection? Self-protection? I don’t know. Those lips were curled, but if you looked close, you could see them quiver.