Music

With the release of her sixth album Seya, Oumou Sangare has gone from an outsider who sang about taboo subjects like polygamy and forced marriage to a major national celebrity.

Rock critic and Fresh Air regular Ken Tucker joins the show to review Wussy, the self-titled third album from the Cincinnati, Ohio quartet.

Singer, songwriter and performer Janelle Monae earned a Grammy nomination for her 2007 album Metropolis, and caught the eye of Sean "Diddy" Combs, who signed her to his Bad Boy roster.

American mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato released a dazzling CD of Handel arias — Furore, a collection of set-pieces from operas and oratorios in which Handel's characters experience flights of passion.

Jazz critic Kevin Whitehead reviews Lucky Thompson: New York City, 1964-65 featuring rare live recordings of saxophonist Lucky Thompson.

The Godfather of Punk has released a new album called Preliminaires, featuring standards like "Autumn Leaves" and "How Insensitive," as well as an original song inspired by Louis Armstrong.

Rock critic Ken Tucker looks back on American Idol's most recent season, when Adam Lambert and Kris Allen vied for the top spot. He says the wrong aspiring idol won.

Sarah Borges and the Broken Singles are a Boston-area quartet raised on punk rock and country music. Rock critic Ken Tucker reviews their new album, The Stars Are Out.

Best known as founder and frontman for the Los Angeles punk band X, musician John Doe has always had a weakness for country music — and X's sound, in fact, sometimes had a twang to it. After that band's dissolution, Doe explored his countrified yearnings further, and in recent years he's turned in some eminently satisfying roots rock. With Country Club, Doe dives headlong into the genre, collaborating with the Canadian band the Sadies on a collection of classic covers originally recorded by titans like Merle Haggard, Tammy Wynette and Willie Nelson.

The rise of the San Francisco rock scene in the mid-1960s is a well-known story, but one which might have taken an entirely different direction if Frank Werber's fortunes had played out differently.