The World Cafe

Grammy-winning Latin-music producer Aaron Levinson joins WXPN's David Dye for this, the 17th segment of World Cafe's Latin Roots series. Levinson, a Philadelphia native, started his music career at the Philadelphia High School for the Creative and Performing Arts. With a background as a musician and composer, he's a former governor of the Philadelphia chapter of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences. Levinson has gone on to start his own record label, Range Recording Studios, and has produced and released more than a dozen albums along the way.

Van Hunt is something like a cross between Thelonious Monk and Prince: throaty and suave yet artistic, bold and a little weird. His inventive style speaks to his strong will, a trait that propelled the college dropout to move from his home in Ohio to the music hub of Atlanta.

Seth and Scott Avett spend a good chunk of their lives on one tour bus or another, so asking them to perform in one isn't all that different from asking them to perform in one of their own living rooms. They may be far away from their native North Carolina — to be exact, they're captured here in a Camden, N.J., parking lot in conjunction with the XPoNential Music Festival — but the setting is cozy enough for Seth Avett to brew tea before performing.

JD McPherson's "big break" came when he introduced himself to producer and bassist Jimmy Sutton of The Four Charms via MySpace. After receiving several of McPherson's demos, Sutton immediately recognized his talent, and the Oklahoma native moved to Chicago to begin recording with Sutton. The pair released a music video for "North Side Gal," which became a viral hit.

Former Nickel Creek fiddler Sara Watkins is a musical protege, both as a vocalist and as a multi-instrumentalist who plays the guitar, mandolin and ukulele. Watkins enjoyed widespread success in Nickel Creek, which included her older brother Sean and childhood friend Chris Thile.

Aimee Mann's eighth studio record, Charmer, comes out in a month. Charmer is also the title — and subject — of the album's first video, which features a robot double of Mann played by three-time Academy Award-nominated actress Laura Linney of The Truman Show, The Squid and the Whale and The Big C.

The video, directed by Tom Scharpling, deals lightheartedly with the idea of fame and persona with Mann playing herself and Linney playing her robot double.

The Tallahassee band Carrousel released its first full-length album, 27 rue de mi'chelle, in May. The group's trippy, cathartic, lovelorn dream-pop often references time spent around the ocean, but there's meticulousness to the sound that could only come from countless hours in the studio. Download Carrousel's head-turning "14" and the new album's title track in this installment of World Cafe Next.

The prelude to Canadian singer-songwriter Corb Lund's new album sounds like a classic country music song. Lund built a cabin in rural Alberta with his longtime girlfriend and favorite uncle, but after the cabin was completed, his girlfriend left and his uncle died. Snowed in for weeks at a time, Lund emerged with Cabin Fever, the title of his new album.

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Audio for this feature is no longer available.

The word "supergroup" gets thrown around like so much confetti, then affixed to any band whose members have worked on high-profile projects of any kind in the past. But not all supergroups are the bloated product of committee thinking or Frankensteinian ego exercises; some are just established musicians who've discovered organically that they like working with certain other established musicians.

San Antonio native Alejandro Escovedo co-hosts the latest installment of Latin Roots, in which he discusses the Latin character of his hometown's music since the 1950s. Escovedo's prolific rock music has always had strong Latin influences as a result of the time he spent listening to his parents' records.

Alejandro Escovedo has played virtually every kind of rock 'n' roll there is to play, from punk to orchestral to country, during a career dating back to the 1970s.

It's gotten to that point in the dog days of August where the air is stale and nothing seems to be moving. But sometimes all it takes to snap me out of a late-summer heat coma is the sound of a new and electrifying voice — like that of Lianne La Havas.

Being the only child of rock 'n' roll's king has kept Lisa Marie Presley under a long shadow, but she's found ways to make her music stand out that don't involve her lineage or occasionally stormy personal life.

Five-time Grammy winner and New Jersey native Mary Chapin Carpenter has been cranking out country and folk standards for nearly a quarter of a century. Her recent 11th album, Ashes and Roses, finds the singer-songwriter reflecting on grief over her father's death, her recent divorce and concerns about her own health.

The L.A. band La Santa Cecilia crafts a unique style of Latin Alternative music by mixing traditional South American rhythms with everything from tango and mariachi to rock, jazz and Afro-Cuban percussion. The sextet, named for the patron saint of musicians, is led by the enchanting voice and often eccentrically flamboyant presence of Marisol "La Marisoul" Hernandez.

The English piano-rock band Keane formed back in 1997, but it wasn't until 2004 that the group's album Hopes and Fears took off on the strength of the smash single "Somewhere Only We Know." A Best New Artist Grammy nomination followed, and in the years since, the group has released three more albums: 2006's Under the Iron Sea, 2008's Perfect Symmetry and this year's Strangeland.

Singer-songwriter Langhorne Slim (real name: Sean Scolnick) took his stage name from his hometown of Langhorne in Bucks County, Pa. After studying at the Conservatory of Music at Purchase College, Slim moved to Brooklyn and built a national following by touring with The Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players. Eventually, he made his way to Portland, Ore., where he's lived since the 2009 release of Be Set Free.

Having already found success as the singer of the Irish band The Frames and as half of the folk-pop duo The Swell Season, singer-songwriter Glen Hansard is venturing out as a solo artist.