SINCE THE RELEASE of his last album, in 2007, Rufus Wainwright has written and staged an opera, recreated Judy Garland’s legendary 1961 concert at Carnegie Hall and faced the death of his mother, folksinger Kate McGarrigle. So perhaps it’s no surprise that when it came time to record his latest effort, All Days Are Nights: Songs for Lulu, he wanted to keep things simple.

“I was really in need of solitude, in order to process all the different relationships that were inundating me,” he says of the choice to record with only piano accompanying his celebrated tenor.

Wainwright’s five previous albums have been characterized by complex compositions and ornate arrangements. But the 36-year-old learned the power of more stripped-down music from his father, singer-songwriter Loudon Wainwright III. “Also, I’ve always been a little insecure about my piano playing, so this was the chance to corner that beast.”

The title of All Days Are Nights is taken from one of three Shakespeare sonnets that Wainwright sets to music. The album also features the final aria from Wainwright’s opera, Prima Donna, which makes its North American debut in June at Toronto’s Luminato Festival.

But Wainwright’s affinity for classical forms often yields to other creative impulses. The record opens with “Who Are You New York?” a wistful meditation on the city, and closes with “Zebulon,” a soaring depiction of Wainwright’s teenage romances. “It’s a double-edged album,” he says. “I tried to create a spectrum that listeners can lose themselves in, with peaks of technique and valleys of simplicity.”

Wainwright’s sister Martha, an acclaimed singer-songwriter herself, recently got married and had a baby, inspiring “Martha,” a sober reflection on siblings watching their parents age. “It’s eerie that I finally wrote a song about my sister, and it’s coming out when we really need each other the most,” Wainwright says. “But the album was actually finished before my mother died. She got to hear a lot of it, and I believe that now her spirit is out in the ether and can help ferry these songs along.”

The former editor in chief of Spin and Vibe, ALAN LIGHT is often lost in a valley of simplicity.

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COURT YARD HOUNDS

Court Yard Hounds

Sisters Martie Maguire and Emily Robison, the fiddler and guitarist-banjoist, respectively, of the Dixie Chicks, formed this country-fried outfit after Natalie Maines went on hiatus. The result blends the DC’s winsome porridge of plucky folk and serious Nashville chops—minus the political sloganeering.

“EVER SINCE I WAS a very young boy, I always enjoyed trying to put thoughts into rhythm and rhyme,” says Merle Haggard. “I do it for fun. I don’t put pressure on myself—I don’t sit down and say, ‘Okay, now I’m gonna write a classic!’”

Whatever his technique, over the course of his 50-plus-year career, Haggard has consistently created some of the greatest songs in country music history, including such masterpieces as “Mama Tried,” “Sing Me Back Home,” “Hungry Eyes” and of course that ballad of jet-age yearning “Silver Wings.” His new album, I Am What I Am (Vanguard Records), is his 75th, give or take, and demonstrates that the Country Music Hall of Famer still has a sound and a story that’s all his own.

The record—his first collection of all-new material in five years— covers a wide and heartfelt emotional range, from Haggard’s earliest memories, on “Oil Tanker Train” up to “Mexican Band,” a raucous celebration of tequila. In recent years, the man behind “Okie from Muskogee” has gotten even more outspoken politically (increasingly liberal, he’s written songs protesting the Iraq War and supporting Hillary Clinton’s presidential run), and the album’s opening song, “I’ve Seen It Go Away,” presents a despairing look at today’s culture: “I’ve seen it all completely fall apart,” Haggard sings. “And I’ve seen our greatest leaders break their peoples’ heart.”

On the phone from his California home, a few days before heading back out on the endless road, the 73-year-old singer explains that the song represents something of a disappointed farewell to his political commentary. “I’m gonna let the younger people do the criticizing,” he says, “and I’ll take a look at the bigger picture and write about that.”

A knockout performance at last year’s Bonnaroo festival in rural Tennessee proved that yet another generation has embraced Haggard as the ultimate rebel—a sentiment expressed a few years ago by rising country star Eric Church in the song “Pledge Allegiance to the Hag.” The man behind 40 No. 1 hits on the country charts estimates that two-thirds of his audience today is made up of younger fans and credits the internet with spreading the word.

“We got off the bus the other day,” Haggard says with a laugh, “and this family was there with a little four-year-old girl. And I heard her say, ‘Is that the man who sings “Big City”?’ They told me they were at the show because she wanted to come.

“It gives me a reason to wake up every morning,” he adds, “to know there’s some kid out there that’s going to discover my music today.”

ALAN LIGHT, former editor-in-chief of Spin and Vibe, has a seven-year-old son who’s also fond of guitars and trains.

THE CHIEFTAINS TEND to make friends wherever they go. In a career that now spans 48 years, Ireland’s premier traditional band has not only exported the folk songs of the Emerald Isle all over the world, it has jammed with everyone from Van Morrison and Elvis Costello to a who’s who of like-minded musicians from Nashville, Cuba and around the globe.

“Everything we’ve done has a connection to the heritage of the Irish people, though,” says Paddy Moloney, the four-piece band’s piper, accordionist and cofounder. “We never really depart from who and what we are.”

The story behind the music on San Patricio, the Chieftains’ new album, is a case in point. A mix of traditional Mexican dances and ballads featuring numerous Mexican collaborators, the record is a tribute to the St. Patrick’s Battalion, a group of mid-19th century European conscripts (many of them Irish) who deserted the U.S. Army to fight for Mexico during the Mexican- American War.

When America won the war, grabbing Texas in the process, many San Patricios were tried as traitors. But the battalion has long been lionized in Mexico. “Back in 1997, the Mexican government issued a postage stamp commemorating them,” Moloney explains. “And one of the places we recorded is a convent in the town of Churubusco, where a battle was fought. It’s now a museum, and we were able to play with Banda de Gaitas del Batallón de San Patricio, the military pipe band that’s in residence there.”

The album blends the two cultures, bringing the Chieftains’ style to traditional songs the San Patricios might have heard. In addition to Mexican stars such as Los Tigres del Norte, Lila Downs and Mariachi Santa Fe de Jesus Guzman, the album features Linda Ronstadt (whose father is Mexican) and guitarist-producer Ry Cooder, a friend and longtime collaborator whose original song, “The Sands of Mexico,” fits nicely with excavated tunes such as “El Chivo” and “Persecucíon de Villa.” “Some pieces sound like our own Irish folk dances,” says Moloney, astonished by the similarities.

The album’s epic centerpiece, “March to Battle (Across the Rio Grande),” combines thundering Irish martial rhythms with narration by Northern Ireland–born actor Liam Neeson, who saw cinematic potential in the story of the forgotten fighters. Moloney laughs while remembering Neeson’s rather pointed comment during the recording process: “‘If you ever want to turn this into a movie,’ he told me, ‘count me in.’”

K. LEANDER WILLIAMS likes his corned beef with a smidge of pico de gallo.

SITTING IN HER SUN-FILLED LOFT in Paris, willowy, dark-eyed, 38-year-old Charlotte Gainsbourg is happy to have a little quiet time. It’s been a hard year. “I would even say a traumatic one,” she says in her dusky French accent, recalling the brain injury she suffered while waterskiing. Even the award she won at the Cannes International Film Festival (for her role in the latest film by Danish provocateur Lars von Trier) was hard-earned. Making the film was a painful experience. “It’s good to have it behind me,” she says.

Gainsbourg expresses her pain clearly on the title track of IRM, her new album. The song’s shadowy rhythms swirl and ping-pong beneath Gainsbourg’s voice in a techno-pop simulation of the sound of an MRI (the English translation of IRM). “Analyze EKG,” she sings. “Can you see a memory?” The album was written and produced by Beck, and the haunting track is a direct reference to Gainsbourg’s own MRI and subsequent brain surgery.

“IRM actually ended up having two meanings,” says Gainsbourg, the daughter of English actress-singer Jane Birkin and her musical Svengali, the iconic crooner Serge Gainsbourg. “Obviously, the accident frames the initial meaning. But then as we completed the record, it seemed to me that both experiences were about putting yourself in someone else’s hands, allowing them to look inside you. I hadn’t really written songs before, so once Beck and I decided to work together, I let him take the reins. It was fascinating to watch him in the studio, building tracks from the ground up—one rhythm and instrument after another.”

The time she spent in L.A. helped her get acquainted with American culture. “Beck’s lyrics contain images from the blues and other American references that I was unfamiliar with at first,” she says.

To start the new decade, Gainsbourg is confronting one of her biggest fears: She’s going on tour. “Frankly, it horrifies me,” she says with a smoky laugh. “The extent of my performing experience so far is doing two songs during one of Air’s concerts,” she adds, referring to the French lounge act. “I was scared to death, but it made me wonder why I didn’t start doing this at eighteen.”

Brooklyn writer K. LEANDER WILLIAMS was never a fan of waterskiing.

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VLADIMIR HOROWITZ
THE LEGENDARY BERLIN CONCERT

This newly remastered release from Horowitz’s most heralded concert tour displays the fleet-fingered piano master at his dynamic and mesmerizing best.

SADE
SOLDIER OF LOVE

Chilling out is about taking your time, one of soul icon Sade’s specialties: It’s been almost a decade since her last album. The singles off this edgy new release suggest her famed groove is as smooth as ever.

MASSIVE ATTACK
HELIGOLAND

In trip-hop, time is elastic, which may explain how seven years have passed since MA’s last proper release. The update is a pulsating journey, with vocals by Damon Albarn, Hope Sandoval, and Tunde Adebimpe.

THE FOUR IVY LEAGUERS in Vampire Weekend know people want to dislike them. They’re making the rock star thing look too easy. A year before their self-titled debut was released in 2008, when they were fresh out of Columbia University, they’d already become favorites of the blogosphere. With the Vampires’ peach-fuzzed faces and penchant for V-neck sweaters, it’s not hard to see why more than one culture watcher predicted public opinion would turn against the band’s brainy, danceable, panglobal rock.

“It gets complicated when people read about you before they actually hear you,” says keyboardist/singer Rostam Batmanglij. “With the first record, we realized that sometimes even the favorable stuff written about us had an odd cast, kind of ironic or detached.” Even so, the backlash never really arrived, and judging by the giddy anticipation of Contra, the band’s follow-up, it never will.

On the new record, VW again combines sunny pop with sinewy rhythmic and melodic flourishes culled from abroad, most notably the U.K. and Africa. Where the first disc pondered things like etiquette and mansard roofs, the opening track on Contra rhymes “horchata,” a popular Latin American beverage, with “balaclava.” They somehow draw upon even more global influences without sacrificing their Manhattan breeziness.

On the surface, at least, much of the credit for VW’s sonic signature goes to singer-frontman Ezra Koenig, whose reedy voice is a marvel. Though often thin as paper, it’s equipped with a catalog of hefty hollers, all of which offset Batmanglij’s perfectly calibrated string arrangements. Recently, however, a respected rapper suggested in the New York Times that it’s actually bassist Chris Baio’s rubbery lines that pull in fans from unexpected quarters. “He got into us after hearing us on the iPod of his manager’s son,” remembers Batmanglij. Listeners may not be as excited about that endorsement by Ghostface Killah, nor will they likely untangle the disc’s various influences, from Bollywood to the Hallelujah Chicken Run Band.

A collection of references and brainy tricks is always impressive, but a great record connects with an audience on an altogether more visceral level—i.e., it rocks—and in that sense, Contra more than qualifies.

K. LEANDER WILLIAMS will always cherish his Brooklyn breeziness.

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What else to listen to on the go in January

Magnetic Fields
Realism

Singer-songwriter Stephin Merritt’s latest offering is the response to Distortion, its feedback-soaked predecessor. This time, Merritt’s crystalline melodies arrive unadorned.

Ringo Starr
Y Not

Still getting by with help from old friends (Paul McCartney, Joe Walsh, Dave Stewart) and new (Joss Stone, Ben Harper), the nerdiest Beatle churns out hard-driving stadium rock —and it works.

Alexandre Tharaud
Chopin: Journal Intime

Frederic Chopin’s 200th birthday promises a waterfall of tributes. Renowned piano virtuoso Tharaud’s idiosyncratic brilliance, on display on “Private Diary,” is most promising.

HOLIDAY MUSIC OFTEN gets a bad rap, and Bob Dylan’s recent surreal croaker, Christmas in the Heart, isn’t likely to change that (though the royalties go to charity, which is a plus). Nor will the new offerings by Sting, Michael McDonald and Judas Priest’s leathery singer Rob Halford do much to warm the hearts of true yule-tune aficionados. Yet each December, they arrive, like intrusive relatives. “Record labels still see Christmas records as sort of a cash cow—hence the sheer number of them,” says Brad Ross-MacLeod, the self-proclaimed King of Jingaling, who prefers the more obscure entries. “It’s amazing the number of fantastic composers and arrangers who have been all but forgotten.”

Ross-MacLeod, a schoolteacher in Kenosha, Wisconsin, grew up on classics by The Hollyridge Strings and the British vocal arranger Mike Sammes. Four years ago, his search for these and other chestnuts prompted him to found falalalala.com, which has become the goto site for vintage Christmas-music connoisseurs, logging more than 1.5 million hits during the 2008 holiday season.

“The period I’m interested in stretches from about the late ’40s to the mid-’70s,” the King explains matter-of-factly. “You know how your parents had those three Christmas records they pulled out every year? Well, if you think about it, those songs actually become Christmas for you. What the site does is connect people who are looking for a favorite old record with experts”—his “elves.”

Fittingly, perusing the site is a bit like being transported back in time, with Ross-MacLeod cueing up the best tracks from vinyl LPs others of us might overlook in thrift stores. Every day between December 1 and Christmas, he posts a different gem, the culmination of which is a downloadable compilation, Adventure in Carols. He doesn’t upload anything available on CD or MP3, so it’s quite possible that falalalala.com is the only place to find, say, The Caroleers’ version of the Texas swing ditty “When Santa Claus Gets Your Letter” or the Brazilian group Os Velhinhos Transviados’ “Noite Silenciosa,” a funky take on “Silent Night.”

Though he admits to being a little “obsessed,” Ross-MacLeod says his passion for the holidays is purely musical. “It’s not like if you rode by my house you’d see over-the-top decorations,” he says. “My wife and I have a vintage white Christmas tree—maybe a little on the kitschy side, but that’s about it.”

K. LEANDER WILLIAMS is in search of a more festive holiday hat.

HAFEZ NAZERI takes the idea of cultural fusion very seriously. The 30-year-old Iranian composer-who brings his modern version of Persian classical song to Carnegie Hall on November 14, becoming the first Iranian musician ever to headline a show there-has spent the past decade persuading audiences around the world to explore one another’s traditions. “To Western ears, our music is the sound of this unknown country, which has seven thousand years of history,” Nazeri says over tea at a Midtown Manhattan bakery. “I want to be the new face of the country, to show people that through music we are all becoming one.”

Growing up in Tehran as the son of celebrated vocalist Shahram Nazeri- “the Pavorotti of Iran”-Hafez began performing with his father when he was only three. By 10, he’d already invented a new way of playing the daf, an ancient tambourine-like percussion instrument. In Nazeri’s household, musical rules were meant to be broken: During the early ’70s, his father was the first Persian singer to interpret the ancient verses of Sufipoet Mawlana Jalal-al- Din Rumi. “Because of the vocabulary Rumi used, his verses didn’t match with Persian classical music,” Hafez explains. “But my father wanted to have his own signatures, and this was what he taught me. He never let me become an imitator.”

A decade ago, after Nazeri, then 20, wowed his countrymen with his Rumi Ensemble-which toured the country and attracted a record-breaking 140,000 concertgoers in Tehran- Nazeri moved to New York to attend the Mannes College of Music, where he began studying Western classical music. “In Iran, everyone thought of me as just the son of this famous singer,” he says. “When I came here, I thought, ‘Nobody knows me anymore. I can do whatever I want,’ and I knew I had the potential to create more excitement here.”

Nazeri began his Rumi Symphony Project in 2007 “to create a universal music using Rumi as a symbol of peace.” Eight hundred years after the renowned mystic died, Nazeri notes, he has become the best-selling poet in America. “Rumi’s poems are part of our background in Iran, but they don’t belong to anybody,” says Nazeri. “The whole message is to first just close your eyes to the outside and go find that diamond inside you. If you find it, let it shine, because the more it shines, the more you can do important things for your life and others.”

JENNY ELISCU hosts a show on Sirius XMU, Saturday through Tuesday from noon to 6 p.m.

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Norah Jones
THE FALL

The past work of this silky-voiced Brooklynite surprised us with its elegance. But this album is a much riskier effort, the pretty jazzpop spiked with spooky textures and clever turns of phrase.

Yonder Mountain
String Band
THE SHOW

Part Grateful Dead, part Del McCoury Band, this Colorado quartet’s new effort is a fiddlerific collection of footstomping bluegrass anthems and lonesome blue-sky harmonizing.

Q-Tip
KAMAAL THE ABSTRACT

A fusion of jazz and rap that never quite finds its groove, this record-by the former Tribe Called Quest frontman-is nonetheless full of brilliant moments, like the piano vamps and rhymes on “Even if It Is So.”

SHOWBIZ MYTH NO. 3: Rock stars don’t keep the same hours as the rest of us. Mythbuster? It’s just shy of 2 p.m. in bucolic upstate New York, and bassist/singer/songwriter Meshell Ndegeocello is preparing lunch at her home after several hours of rehearsal for an upcoming tour. Practice has gone well, and Ndegeocello and her band are buoyant—especially considering they started practice around the time most of us are hitting the snooze bar.

“We had work to do,” Ndegeocello explains, her husky voice deepening even further, feigning seriousness before breaking into a chuckle. “Believe me, I’m quite capable of sleeping all day, too.”

Still, the rehearsal schedule adds yet another (thin) layer to Ndegeocello’s mystique. She has spent two decades keeping audiences guessing about everything from her sexuality (album title from 2007: The World Has Made Me the Man of My Dreams) to what sort of aartist she really is. Ndegeocello scored a hit single with a duet with John Mellencamp back in 1994 (a raucous cover of Van Morrison’s “Wild Night”), but since then she’s flitted between genres, from the groove-oriented autobiography of 1999’s Bitter to the instrumental jazz of 2005’s The Spirit Music Jamia: Dance of the Infidel.

“There have been times when I’ve considered not making any more records, just to be rid of this whole music industry process of categorization,” she confesses. “What keeps me doing it is how much I enjoy the process of making something that people can listen to forever, no matter what the style of music is.”

Ndegeocello feels Devil’s Halo, her latest disc, is yet another departure from previous efforts, not so much musically as lyrically. “It’s not as autobiographical,” she says, referring to her signature frankness about lovesickness, promiscuity and spiritual awakening. “I see these songs more as people-watching, which I’ve been doing a lot of when I’m at my apartment in Brooklyn.”

Perhaps the piece that’s closest to her heart is the dreamy cover of the ’80s R&B group Ready for the World’s slow jam, “Let Me Love You Down.”

“It’s a favorite from childhood, and there’s a real drama about transcending age differences in dating,” she says. “It’s cool that it’s about the lyrics as well as the beat. You can either nod your head to the music or check out the story.”

Brooklyn-based writer K. LEANDER WILLIAMS burns the candle at one end.

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Lyle Lovett
NATURAL FORCES

This lanky Texan’s latest offering—an effortless blend of old country, gospel and ragtime—exhibits the dark depth of Townes Van Zandt, the growly grit of Steve Earle and the pop-open-a-cold-one vibe of Hank Williams III.

Nellie McKay
NORMAL AS BLUEBERRY PIE: A TRIBUTE TO DORIS DAY

Straight outta the Poconos, McKay deploys her coquettish voice and bizarro lyrics to evoke a sort of rap-singing cabaretin-space, complete with virtuoso ukulele. Somehow, combined with the songs of Doris Day, it works.

Yo-Yo Ma
30 YEARS OUTSIDE THE BOX

This massive, 90-CD box set and 312-page hardcover companion book comprise a collection of the cellist’s career so complete (and, at $789, so pricey) that it’s probably only for the most insatiable of Mr. Ma’s fans.

The idea of Recording an album of duets with Scarlett Johansson came 
to Pete Yorn like a bolt of lightning. 
It happened during an afternoon nap and started with crooner Serge Gainsbourg and Brigitte Bardot. “The image I had in my head of Bardot brought Scarlett to mind,” he says. This was back in the spring of 2006, and Yorn didn’t know that Johansson was already working on her own album—Anywhere I Lay My Head, a collection of Tom Waits covers.

For the actress, it sounded like a fine idea. “He said, ‘Hey, I had this crazy dream that we made an album. Do you want to record one with me?’” she recalls. “And I said, ‘Sure, why not?’”
Yorn’s dream is realized with Break Up, a graceful collection of nine winsome, woozy retro-pop duets that muse on variations of romantic disentanglement. The ethereal “Someday” is dirgelike and bittersweet, with a haunting banjo refrain. “Relator” uses a honky-tonk guitar line and folksy verse-trading, evoking Lee Hazlewood and Nancy Sinatra at their contentious best with 
its sour-grapes chorus: “You don’t relate 
to me, little girl.”

“We wanted to capture the unspoken conversation between two people when they break up—the frustration you feel when you know the relationship’s not going anywhere, but you can’t let go,” says Johansson, who last year married hunky actor Ryan Reynolds. “We are really speaking to each other through the songs.”

ScarJo brings the same authentic cool to her singing as she does to her film roles. At times, her aloof delivery echoes Nico, the doomed chanteuse of the Velvet Underground. Break Up is an ideal showcase for Johansson’s voice—a smoky rasp she’s had since she was a girl. “I wanted to be a Broadway kid, so I used to sing a lot of Gershwin,” she says.

“I was listening to our album the other day for the first time in a while,” says Yorn, “and I remember thinking, ‘Did we put an old-timey effect on her voice later?’ But that’s just the way she sounds naturally, which is very bizarre.”

“Even as a kid, I had a deep voice,” Johansson says. “Everyone would ask me if I had a cold, and I’d say, ‘No, I just sound like this.’ I wasn’t able to sing anything from Annie, but I could belt out a good Ethel Merman.”

Jenny Eliscu is a contributing editor 
at Rolling Stone.

Also this month

What else to listen to on the go in September

Pearl Jam, Backspacer – Lately, PJ has become a steady touring act. But their first release in 
three years is a raucous, defiant declaration that the boys from Seattle still have studio chops. As Eddie Vedder sings on “The Fixer”: “Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah!”

Big Star, Keep an Eye on the Sky – Alex Chilton’s beloved and influential 1970s power-pop act gets a lavish box-set treatment. Highlights of the unmissable four-disc set are too numerous to name and are manifestly, unfailingly big.

Os Mutantes, Haih or Amortecedor – Adored by everyone from Kurt Cobain to Beck, the legendary São Paulo ensemble, which melded British invasion sounds with bossa nova, releases its first album in 35 years. As hoped, it’s beautiful and bizarre in equal measure.What else to listen to on the go in September

IT’S NOT EASY TO FIND Levon Helm’s farm, up a mountain road that twists through pine and hemlock forests a couple of miles outside Woodstock, New York. There are no street lights, no route markers. The only hint is a “Beware of Bear” sign on a tree by the narrow dirt driveway that leads to Helm’s place.

The trip is worth the risk of a bear mauling. For the past five years, Helm, the legendary drummer and singer for The Band has opened his country barn three, sometimes four Saturday nights a month for what he calls the “Midnight Ramble,” a loose jam for a couple hundred fans and some of his close friends. Helm plays drums and mandolin, and he leads a full band that includes longtime Bob Dylan sideman Larry Campbell on guitar, Helm’s daughter Amy on vocals and whoever else happens through that night, be it Elvis Costello, Gillian Welch, Chris Robinson, Norah Jones or Billy Bob Thornton.

“The Ramble’s about nothing but the music,” says Campbell, sitting at the kitchen table after a show in June.

“It’s no beauty contest,” adds Helm, who is spry at 69.

The Arkansas native first arrived in Woodstock in 1967, when The Band was backing Dylan. The group wrote the legendary Basement Tapes with Dylan here, as well as their debut, Music From Big Pink. They split up in 1976, at which point Helm moved back to Woodstock and quietly released solo records for 20 years. In 1998, he was nearly broke when he was diagnosed with throat cancer and told he’d probably never sing again.

“Two things people don’t want are poverty and cancer,” he has said. “And I had both.”

Miraculously, Helm’s voice came back. In 2004, he began hosting the Ramble to “get my singing back in shape” and to raise money to pay off his debts (tickets are $150 and sell out fast). He never expected the gig to amount to much, and it shows: There’s no stage, and the audience sits on folding chairs and feasts on a potluck buffet in the barn’s kitchen.

On a warm evening in early summer, with the moon shining through the trees outside, Helm performs songs from his new record, Electric Dirt. Tonight, the 11-piece band includes guest Donald Fagen of Steely Dan on piano. Helm beams as he plays his famous shuffling snare rhythm, yelping “Come on!” when the band hits a good groove.

After the last song, with the audience still cheering, Helm slips back to his house. As one of his five dogs, a Staffordshire terrier named Muddy, jumps onto his lap, he sits at a cluttered table in the kitchen and pops open a can of Coke. “This is what I live for,” he says, still grinning. “This joyful noise.”

JASON FINE is the executive editor of Rolling Stone.

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Sonny Rollins

REEL LIFE

Jazz’s greatest tenor man gets funky on this reissued ’82 session. Rollins rolls on a lush version of “My Little Brown Book” and on the breezy “Sonny Side Up,” which wouldn’t sound out of place on a Steely Dan disc.

Willie Nelson

AMERICAN CLASSIC

Nelson’s most recent take on standards has plenty of high moments, especially on the organ-backed “Fly Me to the Moon” and his duet with Norah Jones on “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.” It’s no Stardust, but what is?

Arctic Monkeys

HUMBUG

England’s best young band brings in Queens of the Stone Age’s Josh Homme as producer to explode the band’s adolescent pop-punk sound into cinematic mood pieces filled with whistling guitars and spooky vocals.

CHRIS BLACKWELL was a 22-year-old waterskiing instructor at the Half Moon Resort in Montego Bay, Jamaica, when he got the idea to record a blind cocktail pianist who performed in the hotel bar. “I was just a fan,” says Blackwell, who at 72 has thinning hair and a voice that blends an English accent with a rasta patois. “I loved music, and this was a chance to get closer to it. I really didn’t see it as a business opportunity that would last for fifty years.”

Blackwell pressed 250 copies, the first release of what would become Island Records. It didn’t sell, but over the next three decades, Island grew into one of the most groundbreaking labels in the world, releasing albums by a roster including Jethro Tull, Traffic, Cat Stevens, Roxy Music, Grace Jones, Tom Waits and U2.

But at the core of the label’s identity was Blackwell’s devotion to the music of Jamaica, his mother’s home nation. Island introduced the Caribbean groove to the rest of the world with landmark recordings by Jimmy Cliff, Toots and the Maytals and, most important, Bob Marley.

Marley and the Wailers were already Jamaican stars in 1972 when they showed up in Blackwell’s London office, desperate, stranded and broke after a film project in England had been canceled. Blackwell offered the group £4,000 to record an album. “Everybody said I was mad, that I would never see that money again,” says Blackwell. “The Wailers had a reputation as total rebels who were impossible to deal with.”

But Blackwell saw Marley’s messianic genius. “Bob was a very charismatic personality—he had some kind of aura to him, this sense of greatness. Reggae at that point was known to most people as a novelty music, but I felt Bob could be bigger than Jimi Hendrix.”

Blackwell sold Island to Polygram in 1989, and he retired from the label completely in 1997. But he still keeps tabs on Island’s artists and says the one he’s most excited about is the supremely talented (and equally troubled) singer Amy Winehouse. “To me, she’s the one right now—she’s got it,” Blackwell says. “I hope she can pull herself together.”

Meanwhile, Blackwell has launched two new enterprises: Palm Pictures, a music and film company; and Island Outpost, a chain of boutique hotels that includes the magnificent Goldeneye, on Jamaica’s north shore, originally the home of author Ian Fleming. Blackwell spends much of his time there, living in a rustic cabin overlooking a lagoon. He still shows up for business meetings in shorts and sandals, fresh off his jet ski. “I was never really cut out for corporate life,” he says.

Reggae aficionado JASON FINE is the executive editor of Rolling Stone.

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Wilco
WILCO

On its seventh album, Wilco dives deeper into the post-psychedelic sound first explored on Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.

Even the folkie first single, a duet with Feist, ends with backward-looped guitars melting into the background.

Meat Puppets
SEWN TOGETHER

Kurt Cobain was a huge fan of the Meat Puppets, who disappeared into drug addiction in the ’90s. Now they’re back (thank God) with far-out guitar jams sounding fresher than most of today’s fey indie rock.

Rob Thomas
CRADLESONG

Brace yourself: Rob Thomas is the last true pop star on the Top 40. The Matchbox 20 front-man, an adept craftsman, has an irresistible new single, “Her Diamonds,” that stands far above the country-pop and bland rap ruling the charts.

IF YOU LOOK CLOSELY, the narrow alleyways of Lisbon are lined with ancient fado houses — quaint clubs with blue-tiled walls where locals listen to the melancholy, majestic Portuguese folk music performed in much the same way it was 150 years ago. But when Mariza, the world’s most famous fado singer, needs to reconnect with the music — “to recharge my battery,” she says — she prefers one spot in particular.

It’s called A Tasca do Chico, tucked away in the bohemian Bairro Alto neighborhood, and it’s basically a dive bar crowded with young, rowdy Lisboans and lined with picnic tables sticky with spilled beer. There’s no stage, just an open space in the middle of the room where singers brave enough (or drunk enough) to face the crowd get up and sing. “This place reminds me of the taverna my parents had when I was a child,” Mariza says, drinking Sagres beer from a plastic cup.

A multicultural blend of North African, Gypsy, European and Brazilian folk styles, fado emerged in bars and bordellos when the city was a booming colonial port. Typically, three acoustic guitars back a fadista who belts out songs of suffering, jealousy, betrayal and loss, a heady brew that the Portuguese sum up as saudade, or longing.

A decade ago, fado was a historical relic. But a new generation of singers have revitalized the Lisbon scene, and Mariza — with her striking looks and tempestuous demeanor — is its queen. In Portugal, she outsells Madonna, and now she’s set to conquer the rest of the planet.

Mariza grew up in Mouraria, a tough, working-class neighborhood. On weekends her parents’ taverna hosted local singers, and Mariza would sneak in late at night to listen. “From the age of five I used to clean the floor, wash the glasses, peel the potatoes with my mom,” she says. “And at night I would hear fado — it was magical.”

But she never intended to sing it. As a teenager, Mariza performed samba, R&B and disco covers in a local band called Funkytown. One night in 1999, on a dare, she performed a traditional fado song at an open mic, and people in the audience burst into tears. Mariza never looked back. “It was not my idea to have a career in this music,” she says. “But I feel very blessed that people wanted to hear me.”

Now she’s expanding the form. On her latest album, Terra, Mariza worked with Cuban pianist Chucho Valdes and guitarist Dominic Miller from Sting’s band. She even sings a jazzy version of the old Charlie Chaplin tune “Smile.” She’s performing it on a two-month tour of the United States, where her main challenge is singing fado to an audience that’s largely never heard it, much less been to Lisbon. “If I can bring the audience there with me, if they can imagine the place,” she says, “they will feel the beauty of this music.”

JASON FINE is the executive editor of Rolling Stone.

ALSO THIS MONTH

What else to listen to on the go in June

Elvis Costello
Secret, Profane & Sugarcane
Costello’s Nashville love affair started in the ’70s, but it fully blooms with this mostly acoustic, T-Bone Burnett–produced blue-grass session. Emmylou Harris joins Costello on the fabulous “Crooked Line.”

Lil Wayne
Rebirth
What’s the world’s greatest rapper to do when hip-hop gets too easy? Switch to rock and roll. For Rebirth, Weezy strapped on an electric guitar and invited Avril Lavigne and Pete Wentz to kick out the jams.

The Dead Weather
Horehound
White Stripe Jack White is a true guitar god, but he transitions well to drums for his new band, this dark alt-rock supergroup featuring members of the Kills, Queens of the Stone Age and The Raconteurs.