What happens when an artist loses all relevance? When a band is no longer the voice of a generation? What place do aging rock n' roll veterans have in a medium that has always favored the young? Three new releases this month find two artists and one band grappling with such circumstances and questions in different ways, all finding old routes to small pleasures. Neil Young has been questioning his place in rock n' roll since 1973, when he released the live album Time Fades Away to mostly negative reviews. The album was meant as a realistic portrayal of what drug-addled world fame had brought to him and his friends, a direct affront to the singer/songwriter who went mega-huge with Harvest. It wasn't what his audience was expecting, and it wasn't what they wanted. Young made it clear he wasn't pandering to any trend, and for the next three decades he traveled wherever his music took him, even when he was sued during the '80s for making albums "not indicative of Neil Young" for Geffen records. The point that Geffen missed was there's no such thing as a typical Neil Young album.

His latest album is Prairie Wind, a country-ish affair recorded in Nashville last year between his diagnosis of a brain aneurysm and subsequent treatment. While 2003's disappointing Greendale found Young experimenting with a multimedia format, this album finds him newly inspired and sticking to a mostly acoustic palette with occasional horns. There's an added poignancy to the lyrics, reflecting back on trusty guitars ("This Here Guitar"), old heroes ("He was the King"), growing up ("Prairie Wind") and mortality ("When God Made Me"). On many songs, including "Falling off the Face of the Earth," Young's melodies reach for notes he can't hit, reveling in the beauty of imperfection; other ones are long, mysterious journeys like the excellent "No Wonder," and as good as any he's written.

Perhaps the opposite of the experimental Young is The Rolling Stones. The Stones are really the Law and Order of rock: They came up with a dependable formula years ago (one part misogynist swagger, one part Chuck Berry riffs and a whole lot of Mick Jagger) and have mostly stuck to it since, regardless of lineup changes and evolving musical trends. The only way to distinguish any Stones album since their 1972 masterpiece Exile on Main Street from another is to determine whether it's more or less of a clich. But on their latest disc, A Bigger Bang, it at least sounds like that clich is having a great time.

The Stones know they can't sell albums like in the '70s, or regain the cultural relevance they achieved in the '60s. They tour every couple of years, make millions of dollars by doing it very well, and any new product beyond that is icing on the cake.

A Bigger Bang works because it excels at simplifying the equation. It dumps the backup singers and techno experiments, pegging directly at that unadorned, attitude-derived Stones sound, and out of its 16 songs, there are plenty of highlights. "Rough Justice" is a great opener in the same vein as "Brown Sugar," and "Look what the Cat Dragged in" is anchored by an insatiable riff. "Back of My Hand" is the best blues song they've done since Exile, and "Let Me Down Slow" has some wonderfully lazy slide guitar. The Keith Richards-sung "This Place is Empty" is the album's best cut, adding an extra depth of emotion in the vocals that even Jagger can no longer touch.

And while not every song succeeds (the controversial, Bush-bashing "Sweet Neo-Con" is a far cry from great protest songs like the classic "Street Fighting Man"), A Bigger Bang is easily the band's best in two decades. The Stones have evaded irrelevance by refusing to change. They may remain on your radar, but even an album this good still seems somewhat unnecessary and forgettable at the end of the day.

If the Stones have had a uniformly stubborn attitude in living up to their legacy as the self-proclaimed "Greatest Rock n' Roll Band" in the world, then Paul McCartney has been downright self-mutilating toward his own legendary status. Coming out of The Beatles, McCartney was the most likely of the Fab Four to maintain a pop presence. His first two solo releases seemed the work of a small-minded genius, combining an unembellished tunefulness with a surprising amount of odd sounds. Since then, he's made a solo career out of cheesy hits ("My Love" and "Silly Love Songs"), despicable "topical" songs ("Ebony and Ivory," "Freedom") and countless, forgettable bad albums. McCartney had the biggest reputation to live up to, much more so than Young or the Stones, yet over the last decades has consistently failed at doing anything to suggest that he even cares.

So what about his newest album? Does anyone even care, as long as he schedules another nostalgic stadium tour mostly consisting of Beatles songs? Well, a couple things have changed for McCartney: He quit smoking pot for the first time since starting in 1966, he married his newest love and muse, and he teamed up with Radiohead producer Niles Godrich, who did care about Macca's legacy and wanted to bring out his best work. The result is Chaos and Creation in the Backyard, absolutely the best thing McCartney has done since Abbey Road. Continuing the slightly eccentric, ultra-catchy work of his first solo albums, Chaos and Creation sounds like it was made in 1971, not 2005.

Most remarkable isn't even that McCartney played almost all the instruments himself, but that his voice has reverted back to its younger, more-inspired form. McCartney has referred to "Jenny Wren" as the "son of 'Blackbird,'" and it is as good as anything he wrote with The Beatles. Listen to the way he hums during the solo, and you'd swear this was from the White Album. Other highlights include the upbeat, catchy piano-based "Fine Line" and "Friends to Go," while strings dominate the darker, less-obvious "Too Much Rain" and "At the Mercy."

McCartney might not be the premier pop musician he was during the 1960s, nor any generation's voice, but hopefully fans will hear this album and appreciate that relevancy can always be rediscovered with age.