Music

The band's new Call Me Sylvia is as raucous as its debut, though it's slightly more self-conscious.

Ed Ward reviews the reissued catalog from the multiracial, multi-generational ska band.

Waging Heavy Peace is about his music, raising two sons with special needs, and his own medical conditions, which have included polio, epilepsy and a brain aneurysm.

The singer-songwriter and actor may not fit the country-music mold, but he carves out his own sound on hew new album, 3 Pears.

Memphis has been a music town since anyone can remember, and it's had places to record that music since there have been records. Some of its studies -- Sun, Stax and Hi -- are well-known, but American Studios produced its share of hits, and yet remains obscure.

Hal David, the Oscar- and Grammy-winning lyricist, died Saturday in Los Angeles. He was 91. David is best known for his many collaborations with composer Burt Bacharach between the late '50s and the mid-'70s.

Street Corner Symphonies is a 15-volume year-by-year survey of doo-wop by scholar Bill Dahl.

The members of Shoes have cobbled together albums like stubborn craftsmen who know that their trade is at once outmoded and valuable. Ken Tucker says Ignition retains the same pop-rock rigor heard in the band's 1970s records.

Spektor spent the first nine years of her life in the Soviet Union, where she and her family faced discrimination as Jews. She talks about Russia and her new album, What We Saw From the Cheap Seats, with Terry Gross.

There are lots of stories about the band that got away. For rock historian Ed Ward, one of those groups has always been Autosalvage, a New York quartet who made one album and then stopped playing.