Music

Wainwright has just released an elaborate box-set career retrospective called 40 Odd Years -- and the pun in the title is definitely intended. Rock critic Ken Tucker says it presents the singer-songwriter just the way his music does, artful warts and all.

The Canadian singer-songwriter discusses the death of her sister and singing partner Kate McGarrigle, who died in 2010. Their early albums have been remastered and are part of a new collection, which also includes previously unreleased songs.

Hot Sauce Committee Part Two is the first Beastie Boys album since the all-instrumental 2007 collection The Mix-Up. Rock critic Ken Tucker says the new record is fresh and vital because it sounds so old-fashioned and defiant.

Roy Orbison didn't really find his identity until he signed with a small Nashville label, Monument, in 1959. Ed Ward looks at the 17 singles that put him, and the Monument label, on the map.

The singer-songwriter's new album, Hard Bargain, includes a new song about her days with country-rock pioneer Gram Parsons and a tribute to her late friend, singer-songwriter Kate McGarrigle.

Since the 1960s, the electric guitar has provided a bridge between international folk cultures and modern pop music. An example today is the singer and guitarist Bombino from Niger, whose album Agadez contains currents of blues and rock, along with traces of African folk.

Folksinger Hazel Dickens, a pioneer for women in bluegrass music, died Friday. She was 75. Fresh Air remembers the feminist role model with excerpts from a 1987 interview.

Saxophonist Tim Berne came up on New York's so-called "downtown scene" 30 years ago. That scene is known for postmodern jump-cutters like John Zorn, who'd leap from one style to another in the space of a beat. But Berne went another way; he's fascinated by gradual transitions.

In 1927 and '28, Ralph Peer, a talent scout for the Victor Talking Machine Company, set up recording sessions in a town straddling the Tennessee-Virginia border. The resulting sessions, rock critic Ed Ward says, laid the framework for all of country music.

Diamond has sold 128 million records and written and recorded 37 Top 40 songs. But in the early 1960s, rock historian Ed Ward says, Diamond was writing songs for other musicians while struggling to get his own career off the ground.