Rob Morsberger

It's rare, but occasionally an artist will create a work imbued such prescience that it's eerie. Morsberger is a distinctive and brilliant pop songwriter, and "Ghosts Before Breakfast" is a clever, wise, sad and gorgeously insightful album of meditations on mortality and loss - which he wrote and recorded before learning last fall of his own diagnosis of terminal brain cancer. Songs such as "The Great Whatever," "The Wild Wind," "Cobblestones" and "Feather in a Stream" are heartbreakingly great and packed with grace. Fortuitously, a week from tonight, Morsberger, with Marshall Crenshaw and Jon Harington in tow, plays at the Olde Mistick Village Arts Cinemas. The show benefits Morsberger and his family and also commemorates his new song, "Mystic Redemption," which was commissioned by Art Cinemas owner Bill Dougherty.

- RICK KOSTER