The 21st century folk scare is now in full swing, and if you like your acoustic music rough, there’s no better place to get it that way than via Punch Brothers, the bluegrass band for people who hate bluegrass.

The title of the group’s terrific third album, “Who’s Feeling Young Now?,” probably isn’t intended to make a statement about string-band music's staidness-vs.-vitality dynamics. But it does anyway.

Led by ex-Nickel Creek member Chris Thile, the band continues to rock in a big way, without ever seeming like they’re trying too hard to be mandolin, violin and banjo...

There's a new Diana Krall album out, though it has Paul McCartney on vocals and his name on the cover. This is all a good thing.

All right, so that's a severely reductive way to describe McCartney's fine new album of old standards, "Kisses on the Bottom."

But it's clear Macca ceded a great deal of creative control to Krall, who plays piano on every track but one and is credited with the rhythm arrangements, and her longtime producer Tommy LiPuma, not to mention frequent Krall collaborators like orchestrator Johnny Mandel.

Funny that, 20 years after McCartney had his last major collaboration with a major pop artist, Elvis Costello -- a fruitful but short-lived...

Leonard Cohen sold off his song rights some years back, so he apparently doesn’t collect royalties for the most hilariously over-covered song in “American Idol” history. That’s bad for him, but good for us, since being cash-poor prompted the 70-something singer to come out of semi-retirement and return to the road in the late 2000s -- which, in turn, ultimately spurred the recording of “Old Ideas,” his first studio album in eight years.

As Jeff Buckley, Jason Castro, Lee DeWyze, Rufus Wainwright, Bon Jovi, and about a million other singers would all say: Hallelujah.

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If the Oscar nominations didn’t give artistic purists enough reasons to howl this week, there was the release of Miley Cyrus’ music video for her version of Bob Dylan’s “You’re Gonna Make You Lonesome When You Go,” which arguably elicited even more banshee-like shrieking throughout the land than “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close” being put up for best picture.

Cyrus’ recording is but one of 76 songs on the longest version of a new charity compilation set, “Chimes of Freedom – The Songs of Bob Dylan (Honoring 50 Years of Amnesty International).” You won't have a...