Search results for

After toiling for years in obscurity, New Jersey native Ted Leo has become a favorite among indie rockers. His latest CD is Living with the Living.

A debut at the Metropolitan Opera is an opera singer's dream. It's about to become a reality for tenor Lawrence Brownlee.

Singer-songwriter Neil Sedaka, who marks his 50th anniversary in the music business this year, helped create what's known as the Brill Building sound in the late '50s and early '60s. He's been inducted into the Songwriter's Hall of Fame, but he got his start as a classical pianist. He joins Terry Gross to talk about his life as a performer — and about The Definitive Collection, a career-spanning greatest-hits compendium.

It's audacious to declare the end of an entire musical subculture, and downright outrageous to do so when it's your musical subculture. With "Hip Hop Is Dead," Nas attempts to steer the genre in new directions while reasserting his status as one of its foremost personalities.

Singer, musician and folklorist Mick Moloney's album, McNally's Row of Flats, centers on theater songs by an Irish songwriting team from the late 1800s. The team consisted of actor and writer Ed Harrigan and musician David Braham, both acclaimed performers of the early Great White Way.

A new CD features a unique musical combination from Ghana: drums, singing, bells and squeeze-bulb horns. The band members are taxi and truck drivers, and their music, por por, is named after the sound their horns make.

At first, The Avett Brothers' "Yardsale" unfolds as a fairly straightforward study of the mundane items at a neighborhood yard sale. But then, three-quarters of the way through, the North Carolina brothers shift gears radically, speculating about how nice it would be to burn the whole lot of it.

Alternating between carefree indie-rock and melancholy synth-pop, the North Carolina husband-and-wife duo writes some of the year's catchiest hooks and sing-along choruses. On the new Night of the Furies, the band hits its stride.

Love Songs of the '70s finds Osmond casting his gaze back to beloved — some might say reviled — hits, including "I Can See Clearly Now," "How Deep Is Your Love," and a song Barry Manilow made famous: "Mandy."

Brazilian singer Ceu loves soul, jazz, hip-hop and afro-pop. And those influences are apparent on her new self-titled CD. But the foundation underlying it all is the Brazilian samba. "It's what sticks to the soles of my feet, " she says.