Listening to Mieka Pauley play and sing "All the Same Mistakes" in her Daytrotter.com session released earlier this year, it's hard to imagine somebody who at one point loathed her music.

Using just her voice and an acoustic guitar, she is defiant and forceful yet also surprisingly supple, muscular but precise. The version that appears on her 2008 album Elijah Drop Your Gun is prettier and more delicate and takes advantage of her full band, but the Daytrotter version smolders, builds, and ignites.

Yet in early 2007, Pauley said that she felt ensnared by that voice-and-guitar combo. She had what she called "a very sad epiphany" while looking in a bathroom mirror: "What am I doing?"

The singer/songwriter Sondre Lerche speaks of his audience like a pool of friends and acquaintances -- a blob that's ever-changing.

With each album, he said, "you're gaining someone, and you're losing someone. ... You're going to be reunited with someone you met in the past, and somebody else is going to take some time off and not be a part of what you do, and then also someone brand-new is going to enter the field and be excited about what you do. ... I like that idea."

That speaks to a healthy attitude toward the consequences of his artistic exploration, as well as the fickle taste of the public, but it also reflects the intimate nature of his adventurous, manicured, instrumentally omnivorous pop music, which seems to foster a relationship between artist and audience.

Lerche should be right at home at his Daytrotter.com show on Wednesday at Huckleberry's, with the small venue offering him plenty of opportunity for that give-and-take.

Despite being an internationally known singer and songwriter, Gary Jules -- performing on Sunday at Huckleberry's in a Daytrotter.com show -- has neither a manager nor a publicist.

He did at one time, riding his and Michael Andrews' version of Tears for Fears' "Mad World" to the top of the UK pop charts in late 2003.

But the success, he said in a phone interview last week, led to "a lot of stuff I considered to be, I don't know, pork-barrel spending, fat that needed to be trimmed. ...

"I ended up in a lot of situations that I wasn't comfortable with. ... This is not what I started doing music for. A lot of those things were generated either through the people I had hired or the miscommunication between me and them."

By uncomfortable situations, Jules doesn't mean hookers and drugs. ("I'm totally fine with hookers and drugs," he joked.) But managers and publicists would try to get him in Rolling Stone and Spin and other major music magazines, while Jules felt his audience was more likely to read Dwell.

"You can spend a whole lot of money on traditional music-publicity stuff without ever really getting anything done ... ," he said. "There are a lot more interesting ways to do publicity and to have a career these days."

Jules would know. He had the happy accident of "Mad World," used at the emotional climax of Richard Kelly's 2001 cult-classic film Donnie Darko, other successes in film and television licensing, and the on-air support of influential radio hosts Nic Harcourt (of KCRW in Santa Monica, California) and Bruce Warren (of WXPN in Philadelphia).

Roman Candle has had bad luck following good fortune in the music business, and it's almost certainly more frustrating than just-plain-rotten luck.

What was supposed to be the group's major-label debut, on a Hollywood Records subsidiary, was shelved for nearly three years despite persistent buzz about the band and the record. The long-time-coming album prompted Pitchfork to call Roman Candle "one of the great unsubstantiated rumors of modern pop-rock."

V2 Records eventually bought the masters and put out the CD, The Wee Hours Revue, in 2006. But that label was effectively closed seven months later. It was at that point that the members of Roman Candle had an epiphany.