E-40 has been defying conventional wisdom since 1988, and he shows no signs of slowing down. The Bay Area rapper and businessman released three albums this week, called The Block Brochure: Welcome to the Soil 1, 2 and 3. His contract with major label Warner Bros. ended in 2008, and since then he's put out seven albums — two in 2010 and 2011 and now these three — always at the end of March. "I've been going crazy," he says.

The Northern California hip-hop community E-40 calls home has long been overwhelmingly creative, particularly when it comes to language and vocal experimentation. But more than anyone else, by building on the innovations of local legend Mac Dre and constantly nurturing young talent, the 44-year-old named Earl Stevens has developed a tone and style of music all his own — dank, slaphappy bangers with hearts of gold — while inventing and popularizing slang that spreads all over the world.

I spoke to E-40 at our offices in New York, where he described the budgetary implications of putting out so much music at one time and the difference between doing work and loving your occupation. The satisfaction he gets out of thumbing his nose at formal grammar — so plain on his records — was not dimmed by conversation.

I asked him to talk about one of the songs he put out this week, and he picked "Function," which was produced by The League of Starz. The bass bottoms out so loose and fat it blurs your vision, gives windshields the shivers. The tempo is nonchalant. E-40's articulation is as loose-limbed and delicately controlled as Charlie Chaplin falling down the stairs. His guests on the track snake their verses around the flabby low end and waft them through the hot snare and the shouted stabs. Iamsu in particular, faced with following the veteran, came to play.

"I was put on this earth for a purpose," E-40 told me. "[God] made me to be different. He made me to be an innovator, a motivator. Music is very therapeutic and healing, and I hit it from all angles. I love gospel music, I love gangsta music. I love speaking the real about life. Period."

"Is there an age limit when you're supposed to stop rapping? Not when you're just as relevant as the newer people! You smell me?"

Bowerbirds has a distinctively rural DIY aesthetic: They live somewhat in isolation in the country of North Carolina in a cabin they built themselves using homemade gear. They write devotionals to trees, sparrows and majestic mountains. At one point they lived in an Airstream trailer. But when it came time to make their third album, The Clearing, Bowerbirds' core songwriters Phil Moore and Beth Tacular (who are also a couple) and multi-instrumentalist Mark Paulson eschewed some of their trademark homespun craft.

The band is clearly in expansion mode with its music, allowing the templates of their simple folk songs to bloom into something far richer. They also decided to turn to some outside help. Bowerbirds recorded with engineer Brian Joseph at Justin Vernon's Wisconsin studio April Base and later mixed the record with Nicholas Vernhes of New York's Rare Book Room. Both contributed a discerning ear to all the new sounds and instruments present on the record. "The effect was making us care more about the timbre of all these little details," explains Tacular.

Until The Clearing, Bowerbirds instrumentation was spare — a creaky acoustic guitar, some churning accordion, a violin and a lone bass drum. But the first thing that stands out on Bowerbirds' third record is how vibrant it sounds. The songs contain ornate string passages and regal horn arrangements, clacking percussion, pianos and even some buzzy guitar distortion, sounds that two albums ago might have felt out of place.

I recently spoke with Beth Tacular about one of the record's tracks, "In The Yard," how Bowerbirds came about its richer sound and about the personal struggles Tacular and Moore overcame that rekindled both their relationship and joy for music.

Hear the song and read the interview.

Kurt Wagner, the singer-songwriter who heads up the 20-year-old Nashville collective Lambchop, says his group "never really gave a damn." Even so, its new album, Mr. M, is the result of years of Wagner carving out a life for himself as a musician and — sometimes — a painter.

The album, the group's 11th, is dedicated to the late Vic Chesnutt (Wagner and Chesnutt were close friends and the musical influence is unmistakable). Loss and an understanding of what suffering does to a person seep from the tracks. Intense string arrangements set the album apart from earlier Lambchop projects.

In a phone interview Wagner spoke to me about his songwriting process and trying to work his original career path into his music — photographs of his paintings illustrate Mr. M. Just back from touring Australia, Wagner chose to talk about the song that kicks off the album and that began as an experiment with longtime friend and producer Mark Nevers (who's also worked with Will Oldham, Calexico and the Silver Jews).

"He had an idea about taking strings and deconstructing them and reconstructing them in a more twisted manner."

The Chicago rapper Common has been in the hip-hop game for almost two decades. He released his debut, Can I Borrow a Dollar?, in 1992, and his ninth album, The Dreamer, The Believer, two weeks ago.

In his latest work, the rapper-actor has not strayed from the themes listeners have come to know him for. It is an album of lyrical prowess, lovelorn tributes and good old-fashioned name-calling. Producer No I.D. makes his mark on the entirety of the album, much like he did on the critically-acclaimed Resurrection — most notably on the hip-hop classic "I Used to Love H.E.R."

In a phone interview, Common told me he was "inspired to make music that is the essence of hip-hop and to let it be something that goes beyond that." Going beyond that included letting go of what he called "the torch of consciousness" he often felt he had to carry in his lyrics. Case in point? The fiery wordplay and hard-hitting beat behind the track "Sweet," which was the focus of our back and forth.

What is one of your favorite tracks on The Dreamer, The Believer, and what was the inspiration behind it?

The song that has been getting the most attention has been "Sweet." A lot of people are trying to figure out who I'm talking about. There was no one I particularly had in mind, but if you're offended, then there's something to be said about how you see yourself.

How would you describe the feel and production of the song?

It's rough. When No I.D. first played it for me, I just knew it was going to be a problem. We were going through some samples, and when I heard this I just knew I had to go in on it.

How does "Sweet" fit the natural progression of the album?

It represents the aggression and determination of the believer. The cat that walks into the middle of the ring and just knows he's the best. That knows he's the greatest.

How do you want people to feel after they hear it?

To feel that old school, in-your-face hip-hop. It's confrontational, sometimes telling you what you don't want to hear, but it's passionate and honest. We all could use a little more fire.

How do you feel you've changed lyrically in this track and overall on the album?

I went back to working one producer, and what better person than someone I've grown up with? I feel like this album captures that old thing and gives a look on my past, present and future frame of mind.

As an actor I'm able to be more expressive. Acting has helped me to be more open in my music. With songs like "Sweet," I'm able to be like, "You know what? I ain't holding back nothin'." Because in acting you can't hold back. As an artist, at a certain point I felt like because I established a certain consciousness in my lyrics that I wasn't letting myself express that different side. I got to explore that side more with this album, with songs like "Sweet."

I consider myself a work in progress. Any time I'm asked about my style I say I'm progressing. How I describe my music I say is progressive because I know that I'm constantly changing and growing and evolving. To the core, Common Sense is a loving, creative, Southside man who loves life, believes in God and loves love.

Das Racist (pronounced like "that's racist") are the class clowns of New York underground hip-hop, the smart guys at the back of the room who could probably take over the world if they wanted to but are largely content to hang out and crack each other up. They don't take anything too seriously, themselves included, but they deliver some seriously funny, sharp, and provocative commentary on pop culture, identity politics and consumerism in postmodern America.

After releasing two critically-acclaimed mixtapes — 2010's Shut Up, Dude and Sit Down, Man — for free download, they're getting ready to roll out their first real, pressed-on-plastic, sold-in-stores album. Relax climbed into the iTunes Top 100 after its digital release on Friday and is available today on CD and vinyl from the group's own Greedhead Music label.

We sat down with Himanshu "Heems" Suri, Victor "Kool A.D." Vasquez, and highly caffeinated hype man Ashok "Dap" Kondabolu to talk about "Brand New Dance," a track from Relax that starts out as a loopy send-up of Rick Ross-style gangster rap braggadocio and ends up just plain loopy. There's some lackadaisical dirty talk from Victor about a girl named Candy and her three sisters, a part where Heems compares himself to a family of child actors from the sitcoms Smart Guy and Sister Sister and a line about otters Heems now claims to regret. Oh, and a disconcertingly catchy hook sure to lodge itself deep in your brain.

"Brand New Dance" also features guitar-heavy production from long-time Das Racist collaborator Patrick Wimberly (of Brooklyn indie rock band Chairlift), the result of an experiment with a new aesthetic they call "slacker rock rap." It's not the group's favorite track on the album, but it's a microcosm of the willful weirdness and wise-ass wit that define their style.

Getting these guys to talk about anything for more than a few seconds without veering toward the nearest punchline is nearly impossible, and don't expect them to let you in on the joke once they get there. We may not have walked away with many straight answers, but we did gain some insight into the group's creative process — and their comedic chemistry — as well as their thoughts on rockism, the ambivalent nature of "cross-over appeal" and the inherent strangeness of making music for money.

Listen to the track, and keep it surreal with Das Racist, after the jump.

"Some Written" is a song about being handed a fake phone number. But it's not a dirge. It's instead, in the songwriter's words, "breezy." He also calls it "an act of confidence."

Joseph Mount is the driving force behind Metronomy, whose new album, The English Riviera, was nominated for the Mercury Prize (awarded to the best British or Irish album every year) just last week. To make the album, Mount left his bedroom, where he'd made 2008's Nights Out and 2006's Pip Paine (Pay The £5000 You Owe), and moved production into a studio directly across the street from News International's headquarters in London.

Mount says "Some Written" in particular, but really the whole album, represents the band at ease with itself after three albums, as many lineup changes and outlasting a rash of early-career Internet hype.

Mount and the longest-running member of his band, Oscar Cash, are in the U.S. this week to play two shows, New York on Thursday and Los Angeles on Saturday, with the newest members of Metronomy, drummer Anna Prior and bassist Gbenga Adelekan. They'll be back in the U.S. for more dates in October.

Mount and Cash recently came in to our New York office, where Mount accidentally gave us his real telephone number.

Hear the song and read the interview, after the jump.

Being a pop culture fan requires a high tolerance for pain – the pain of others, that is, and especially of women. It's a function of art to render unspeakable truths metaphorical. As a fan of crime procedurals, southern rap, opera, heck, even Harry Potter novels, I'm completely comfortable with the bodies piling up outside my soul's door every day. Yet it's hard to not sometimes dwell on the fact that so many of those bodies are female. It's a chicken-and-egg conundrum: does all that symbolic rape and mayhem make us more brutal? Does it make real-live brutality possible to bear?

Ruth Gerson is a singer-songwriter and voice teacher who believes in tackling such matters head on. Her own compositions, available on four underrated studio albums, plumb the depths of both love and violence with a clear and empathetic eye. Now Gerson has recorded a collection of murder ballads — those old songs that disseminated the news of the day, transforming gruesome crimes into the stuff of legend — as a way of noting just how deeply these narratives of oppression are embedded within our psyches.

Deceived is a beautiful record. You could listen to it while eating dinner by candlelight. Gerson keeps her powerful voice whispery and calm for these renditions, and the production, by Rick Chertoff and William Wittman, aims for sweetness and light. The effect is to cast new light on familiar songs, from old ones like "The Butcher's Boy," "Knoxville Girl" and "Banks Of The Ohio" to more recent favorites like "Delilah" and "Ode To Billie Joe" — the latter one of two stories in which women live but their children die, the victims of parental cruelty.

Gerson ends the album with a spare rendition of "Delia's Gone," the century-old murder ballad that Johnny Cash made a hit late in his career.

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Purchase: Amazon / Amazon MP3 / iTunes

I asked Gerson to answer some questions about that song, her approach to it and the Deceived project in general (all her proceeds from digital downloads and hard copy sales of the album will benefit anti-domestic violence organizations; her goal is to raise $100,000 for Sanctuary For Families, The Family Violence Prevention Fund, The AVON Foundation (Speak Out!), Shalom Bayit and other organizations).

Her answers, given via email, were complex and profound.

Wild Beasts formed in Kendal, a small town in Northern England, nearly a decade ago, when its members were just teenagers. The band's first album, 2007's Limbo, Panto, displayed the traits the band continues to refine — ambition, artisness, intensity and grace — in shifting measures that keep the audience off balance.

The voice of Hayden Thorpe is a major ingredient in that turbulence. A singer with an exceptionally high, clear voice that can sound delicate or almost violently aggressive, Thorpe (his co-lead singer Tom Fleming performs in a solid baritone) instills the band's topics — love, romance and, most frequently, sex — with playfulness, seductiveness, and a touch of menace.

The band is now based in London, and their new album, Smother, out today, sounds quieter and more settled. A sort of boiled-down essence of earlier, wilder themes, concentrated and no less intense for maintaining a constant simmer. We asked Thorpe about his favorite song on the album, and why so many of his band's songs are about sex.

"We have been brutal in the past and we have been frustrated, and that has led to a more confrontational tone."

Merrill Garbus is finding a life beyond lo-fi. Garbus, who records as tUnE-yArDs, released her debut, BiRd-BrAiNs, in 2009. That album was a carefully constructed blend of ukulele, drums and samples recorded into a hand-held digital recorder and produced with the free audio editing software Audacity. On the follow-up w h o k i l l, out today, Garbus and her compatriot Nate Brenner, who started as tUnE-yArDs' touring bassist and became a permanent member of the group, went into a proper studio to write and record.

The new songs might sound more polished, but they are still unmistakeably Garbus' creations. When we asked Garbus which song she would like to talk about, she chose "Gangsta", a live standout that has finally been put to tape after being road-tested for the past year.

Garbus says "Gangsta" came out of finding herself in a confusing and new place. In the song's opening line, she sings, "What's a boy to do if he'll never be a gangsta?" Filled with short blasts of saxophone, a driving drum beat and found sounds that cut in-and-out throughout the song, the music represents the tension of those emotions even when the chorus is a little more exaggerated: "Never move to my hood/'cause danger is crawling out the wood".

"It's like I'm unraveling these thoughts while the music is coming out."

DJ Quik is an elder statesman of the West Coast rap scene. He dropped his first album, Quik Is The Name, in 1991 and set the tone for much of gangsta rap made in California that decade with his allegiance to Roger Troutman-style talkbox and Parliament Funkadelic samples. Since his debut, he's released eight more albums and produced tracks for 2Pac's album All Eyez On Me and Snoop Dogg's Ego Trippin' (with Teddy Riley and Snoop), and two years ago collaborated with Kurupt on BlaQKout.

The man still loves '70s funk and R&B. He says his latest album, which will be released next week, called The Book Of David, is "really honest" and the first single, "Luv Of My Life," is "not to be overthought." He says it's punchlines and fun. To make it, he relied on the same company's drum machines that have been the standard in rap music since the late '80s, Akai, and he's proud of the result.

He brought in Gift Reynolds, a rapper in his early twenties from the west side of Detroit to rhyme over the track. Gift says he was happy to work with Quik on "Luv Of My Life" in particular, because it sounds like the music Quik made back in the early '90s, the music he's still best known for.

Is "Luv Of My Life" a subconscious bite of an Erykah Badu track? Hear the song after the jump.

Wye Oak — the Baltimore-based multi-instrumentalist duo of Andy Stack and Jenn Wasner — began playing music together five years ago. The band self-recorded and self-released its first album, If Children, in 2007. With Wasner's rough-hewn but direct voice at its center, the album was good enough to get the pair signed by Merge Records.

Through two subsequent releases (the 2009 album The Knot and last year's My Neighbor/My Creator EP), Wye Oak's sonic world has expanded, though the priorities seem the same. The pair still build pretty but slippery songs — about characters who often seem anxious or frayed — and then let them swell to monstrous proportions or thin to a wisp before reigning them back in.

Wye Oak's stature has grown too: last month, it opened for the Decemberists on a short tour, and today Merge releases Stack and Wasner's third full-length album, Civilian. We asked the pair to talk about favorite song from the album, and they picked "The Alter." Note the spelling, Wasner says. "For once, with us, it's not a religious reference."

"I started thinking of it as these different competing sides of my brain."

Swedish singer Lykke Li appeared on our radar with her 2008 debut album Youth Novels. Her collection of electro pop songs sifted through the timidity and vulnerability that comes when youth and love collide. Though a strong pop album at heart, the percussion and production are as understated as Lykke Li's coy lyrical advances.

Out today, her sophomore album, Wounded Rhymes, finds Lykke Li fleshing out arrangements with bolder beats and more confident vocals. As she did for Youth Novels, Lykke Li recorded the new album with fellow Swede Bjorn Yttling of Peter Bjorn and John, and though an emotional sensitivity still runs through the album, the songs have more bite this time around, which she attributes to a newfound confidence in the studio and more psychotic arrangements that burst with sound. But when we talked with her about her favorite song off Wounded Rhymes, Lykke Li chose the record's most subdued track: "I Know Places."

Why did you choose "I Know Places" as your favorite song from Wounded Rhymes?
It's just a very simple song, but it's like, you know, should I change it? Or should I do something wild? Sometimes it's just right to keep it almost like a folk song or a blues song. Just go round and round — like why change when you're in a good space?

"It's that tender moment. It's a pause."

Guitarist Ben Chasny has been recording as Six Organs of Admittance since 1998. It's a solo, mostly acoustic affair, and much less imposing than the music he made during his other gig in San Francisco psych giants Comets on Fire. Six Organs' sprawling songs border on the meditative, equal parts spectral and serene, with Chasny's voice often playing a supporting role to the quiet cosmos he conjures.

His latest album, Asleep on the Floodplain, is one of the more tranquil records in his discography and marks a departure from 2009's excellent but eerie Luminous Night. We asked Chasny to talk with us about his favorite song on the album, and he picked its closer, "Dawn, Running Home."

Purchase: Drag City Records

Why is "Dawn, Running Home" your favorite song on Asleep on the Floodplain?
It's my favorite song just because of the way it came about, the way it was made. It started with the ambient sounds and then the drone and eventually worked it's way towards the chords and melody — sort of the opposite way I usually make songs.

The story of the song's "very literal" title, after the jump.

Who is the "I" in Now That's What I Call Music? For a series of compilations that asserts — screams, nearly — the authority of its taste from the cover of each bargain-priced CD, the answer is pleasingly democratic: it's you. Rather, the collective "you," the body of listeners whose taste and purchasing power have — with shocking frequency — managed to cohere around a single artist or song long enough to elevate a hit above a fractured marketplace.

NOW was born in 1983 in England, a collaboration between major record labels designed to collect and repackage those hits every so often. That first installment included songs by UB40, Men At Work, Tina Turner and Phil Collins. The series was imported to the United States in 1998, just before the era of undeniable pop dominated by boy bands and former Mickey Mouse Club stars — and the rise of the Internet. Always designed to mirror the fluctuations in the public's taste, each installment is carefully selected and sequenced, and can be shockingly diverse (that first U.S. compilation included Hanson's "MMMBop," Harvey Danger's "Flagpole Sitta" and "Karma Police" by Radiohead).

But for the purposes of this interview, the "I" in Now That's What I Call Music goes by two names: Jeff Moskow and Laura Rutherford. Moskow has worked on the series as the head of A&R since NOW 4 hit shelves in July of 2000; he's the guy in charge of the songs included on the compilations. Rutherford came to the brand as a product manager at Universal in 2004, before becoming the series' Vice President of marketing and business development. We asked about how they choose the songs on each compilation, what makes a song fit into the NOW universe, and how they manage to make the cover for each installment immediately identifiable but distinct, so buyers know it's it's something they haven't already purchased.

Now That's What I Call Music 37 is out today; its track list includes Eminem, Rihanna, Bruno Mars and Taylor Swift. But to represent the collection, Moskow and Rutherford chose a song by someone they call "the epitome of what NOW wants to be."

Why did you pick Katy Perry's "Firework" for NOW 37?

Jeff Moskow: A song like "Firework" by Katy Perry is sort of a classic NOW type track. She's a huge global superstar. Virtually every song she has as a single is a smash. And as soon as we identify her new single we really mark it as a track we want to go after for inclusion on the compilation. There are other artists like that. I would say that Pink is certainly that way and I would say that Ke$ha has evolved into an artist like that as well. Even when you identify a new single from an artist of that stature, the song still needs to be a big hit to be included. You can't include it, even if it's from a big artist, if it doesn't perform on the charts.

Laura Rutherford: I think Katy Perry really embodies what NOW is all about. There are other artists over the last ten years who we say that about, [like] the Black Eyed Peas or Britney Spears. She's really one of the two or three or four hugest artists in the world right now.

Selection criteria, and the history of the NOW cover, after the jump.

Issues of body and gender have always been tangled up in JD Samson's music. An androgynous woman known for her activism in the gay and lesbian community, Samson was one third of the band Le Tigre and a member of the touring band for Peaches. When Le Tigre went on hiatus in 2007, Samson started MEN as a remix project. Like the band's lineage and genesis suggest, many of the songs on its debut album, Talk About Body, are designed for dance floors, and many are freighted with ideas about politics and sexuality.

When we asked Samson about her favorite song on the album, she picked "If You Want Something," and explained that even though the lyrics are vague, it's no less political.

Purchase: Amazon / Amazon MP3 / iTunes

What do you like about "If You Want Something?"

I like a lot of things about it. To me one of the things that's really exciting is that it was kind of like the last song we wrote for the record. This record took like three years from beginning to end because we kept touring all the time in between so I think that actually we kind of got sick of a lot of the songs that we like picked at and perfected to this crazy extent. And I think that this song was truly kind of like this outburst.

"It can be about love. It can be about money. It can be about your career. Whatever."