NPR's Fred Child profiles Brazilian singer, songwriter and legendary political activist Caetano Veloso. His autobiography Tropical Truth has just been released, as has a new 2-CD set, Live in Bahia.
There's almost nobody better at creating complex musical worlds, but on her new album The Age of Pleasure, Janelle Monáe's aim is to stop thinking. Or at least start thinking about feeling.
By training her eyes on multiple targets, the singer challenges listeners to widen their points of view, compelling them to place her in spaces she's found belonging, not where she's been assigned.
The poet's first recording with a band, when the poems do what they do, lends an emphatic new authority to her words, which she delivers with a hypnotist's composure.
With a new home in Nashville, the singer-songwriter's fifth solo album is a laid-back affair full of zen-like wisdom that lands as guidance for a generation.