This Lear is an old man in a care facility, wearing hospital pajamas and being sung to by the staff on his birthday. Yet, neither radical nor half-hearted, this re-conception of Shakespeare's grandest tragedy results in a respectful and forceful staging.

Holcombe creases a sense of decrepitude and weariness into his deliberately half-wrecked-sounding voice and uses both to pointed effect, speaking directly to the immigrant, the wanderer, the home-seeker in all of us.

Taken together the tracks on Stuart's 18th studio album form not quite a concept album but a contiguous tapestry of engagement with and love for the idealized West, from the Native American chants on the "Desert Prayer" prologue and the laid-back mariachi flavor and slide guitar licks of the tasty instrumental "El Fantasmo Del Toro" to the mellow-catchy Johnny Cash cloak of "Old Mexico" and the drugged-out haze of the title track.

Gone for over half a century, William Edward Burghardt Du Bois lives on through his thought and his prose. A new edition from Restless Books offers an excellent opportunity to broaden our perspective on questions of race in America by increasing our understanding of racism's history and sociology, enlightened by one of the country's most creative minds.

An intimate, meditative two-hander about the deep resonance of comic-book superhero stories with the kids who read them – and with the 20-somethings those kids quickly become.

Her new album matches the blues-rock-soul singer's honeyed voice with a varied batch of songs by top talents ranging from Mississippi John Hurt to The Weepies' Deb Talan to Black Sabbath.

Floyd's music mixes modernist dissonance with classic lyricism, a recipe that the composer-librettist has mastered and fine-tuned perhaps better than anyone else.

Like crushed train cars telescoping into one another, these seven tracks fuse song and soundtrack-style music, contemporary newspaper accounts and musique concrète, into a gumbo of "you are there" tone poems about real-life train crashes of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

A grimly funny, magic-realist portrait of a group of new high school graduates at that scary moment of first flight, assessed and conveyed with the wisdom of hindsight and painted with the brush of an artist.

This exquisite vocal group puts on energetic, high-spirited concerts that free the ancient music of the Renaissance from the museum and dance it out into the town square.