And yet case/lang/veirs, their first album together, feels like something far more substantial and exciting: a worthy extension of three tremendous catalogs, in which three great singer-songwriters sound enhanced and invigorated by the challenge of living up to each other’s legacies. The album’s opening song, “Atomic Number,” grants them equal time to trade lines, blend and showcase their formidable voices, and still build a tune that breathes as a hooky and inviting whole.

The rest of case/lang/veirs finds the three singers leaving each other greater leeway to take solo turns, and each gets her share of powerful highlights. Veirs takes the lead in “Song For Judee,” in which she tells the sad story of folk-rock singer Judee Sill in a way that touches on sordid details without sacrificing the empathy, humanity and grace at the core of so many Laura Veirs songs. Case’s entries, particularly “Delirium” and “Supermoon,” would fit neatly on any of her recent solo albums — which, given the quality of those records, is a high compliment. And lang, ever the polished pro, lets her warmth and gravitas elevate everything her voice touches. With its glorious high notes, “Blue Fires” provides a particularly exquisite showcase for lang’s vocal gift, which remains undiminished if not improved over time.

There’s a generosity of spirit to case/lang/veirs; a sense that all three singers share this particular spotlight eagerly. Along the way, that allows each to shine alongside two of the best backing voices in the business. But their individuality isn’t lost, either: When Case takes the lead in “Behind The Armory,” she hits one of those moments — heard so often on her own records — in which a few words, arranged just so, capture a young lifetime of wounded pride and compromised expectations. “Still I want you to love me,” she sings in the song’s chorus, as the song drops away to make room for the gravity of the confession. It’s an intensely intimate moment, and yet, like everything on case/lang/veirs, it’s all the more potent for the company it keeps.

Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Current-day songwriters Carl Newman and Neko Case performed inside a storefront in the Brill Building this month with their band The New Pornographers. The group’s album, Brill Bruisers, pays homage to a space that holds much meaning for the two musicians. “Pretty much most of the songs that shaped our lives were written here,” Case says.

It was just another office building when it was finished in 1931, but it soon attracted songwriters, publishers and record labels. In the mid-20th century, it was the home base for Neil Sedaka and Burt Bacharach. Paul Simon still has an office there, though as a whole, the building is mostly under renovation.

Case says that a great pop song, on the level of the ones Brill songwriters turned out, has certain qualities.

“Do you want to hear it over and over again?” she says. “Do you feel like singing along to it? Does it have that strange, kind of uplifting feeling?”

In his own songwriting, Newman says he looks for the qualities that cause him to love a song as a listener.

“I always bring up The Monkees, and it always comes off as sort of facetious — but really, when I was a kid, I felt like hearing those Monkees songs made my heart open up,” he says. “When I’m writing a song, there’s a part of me that wants to find that again.”

Finding that feeling, however, is not always easy.

“You know when people get interviewed and they say things like, ‘I just channel the muse; the songs just come out of me’? No, they don’t,” Case says. “It’s work.”

The industry has changed a lot, and the musicians who make up The New Pornographers don’t work out of a single place like the Brill Building. They live in different cities, talk from a distance, break off for solo work, come back together.

The new album grew out of a series of discoveries and improvisations. In the song “Champions of Red Wine,” Newman explains, Case’s lead vocal actually began as a harmony vocal.

“When she sang that vocal, I had a lead vocal and she was singing along with me,” he says. “But then a couple weeks after Neko was gone, we just pulled me out of it and sat there and went, ‘This is so much better.’ ”

Case and Newman describe songwriting and production more as “song editing.” You go through the material again and again, refining your effort to connect with another human being.

“Did I say to my audience what I meant to say?” Case says. “If I was them, are they hearing the way I meant it to be said? You have to push the idea past the point of it being comfortable for you. You gotta squirm around. You gotta get pissed. You gotta break a plate on the floor, leave the house for a while, come back, stand around in your underwear, work on it while you’re supposed to be going to work.”

Perhaps as importantly, Case says, listeners need to be able to put themselves into a song. She recalls how a friend of hers had her impression of a favorite song, The Young Rascals’ “Groovin’,” dashed by reality.

“There’s the part of the song where it goes, ‘You and me endlessly.’ And she said when she was a kid, she thought it was, ‘You and me and Leslie,’ ” Case explains. “Think of the possibilities of ‘you and me and Leslie’! We’re playing records. We’re going to the beach. It’s Sunday. We’re groovin’. It’s better than you and me, just, forever. You don’t really want to ruin it for people if they have their own meaning in there and it means something very specific to them.”

Newman concurs: “People’s misheard lyrics are always better than the real ones.”

Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.