Ry Cooder's new album, I, Flathead, releases today and follows Chavez Ravine (2005) and My Name Is Buddy (2007) as the third and final album in Cooder's California trilogy. Two versions of the new record are available: the standard CD as well as a deluxe package with both the CD and the accompanying 95-page novella that Ry wrote in conjunction with the album songs, told from the perspective of the fictitious musician Kash Buk and featuring an oddball cast of characters and car obsessives from California's drag-racing salt flats in the 1960s.

"Ry Cooder is probably my guitar hero," Billy Bragg says in a Sunday New York Times Playlist. "The economy of his playing is something to be admired at a time when guitar players tend to think the more notes you play the better you are. My Name Is Buddy is up my street because it's capital-P Political ... There's a lot of love in the songs; they fit well in the tradition. Woody Guthrie's spirit runs through this record very strongly. Cooder plays stuff that we now refer to as Americana, but nobody called it that then. His excursions have been great, but for him to come back to where he began is pretty cool."

The National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences has just announced the nominees for the 50th Annual Grammy Awards, including Nonesuch releases from Wilco, Ry Cooder, Joshua Redman, Stephen Sondheim, and Lorraine Hunt Lieberson. Judith Sherman is up for Classical Producer of the Year, including for Kronos Quartet's recording of Górecki's String Quartet No. 3.

Congratulations to Ry Cooder, who received a Lifetime Achievement Award for Instrumentalist by the Americana Music Association (AMA), in a ceremony held earlier this month at Nashville's Ryman Auditorium.

Singer/songwriter Nellie McKay has made a name for herself setting witty, politically savvy lyrics, tongue firmly in cheek, to catchy music reminiscent of Brill Building tunesmiths. (Evidence of this can be found on Audra McDonald's 2006 album Build a Bridge, on which she sings McKay's "I Wanna Get Married.") Nellie tells HARP magazine that she modeled her new album after "proletarian anthems and the fact that I was hoping to become the Ry Cooder of the ukulele."

On October 27, the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles opens La Vida Lowrider: Cruising the City of Angels, a special exhibit celebrating the cultural history of lowrider cars in a city synonymous with car culture. A standout in the exhibit is El Chavez Ravine—a custom-built ice cream truck commissioned by Ry Cooder. Built off the foundation of a '53 Chevy, the truck was painted in painstaking detail by artist Vincent Valdez to tell the story, as Cooder does in his 2005 album Chavez Ravine, of the largely Mexican-American Los Angeles neighborhood destroyed to make way for Dodgers Stadium in the 1950s.

Ry Cooder gave a rare live performance this past Saturday, March 24, on Garrison Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion, which was broadcasting from New York’s Town Hall. Ry and his band played songs from his new Nonesuch release, My Name Is Buddy.

After 40 years, Village Music in Mill Valley, California, will be closing its doors this fall. Ry Cooder will be honoring the historic Bay Area vinyl store with a rare in-store appearance on Saturday, March 10. He'll perform songs from his new album, My Name Is Buddy, which was recently featured on NPR's Morning Edition.

Ry Cooder's latest album, My Name Is Buddy, is due out on Nonesuch on March 6. "Hugely entertaining," exclaims the Observer. "It's a road trip through vernacular American music, dustbowl blues, gospel, folk and bluegrass in the company of three unlikely characters ... It sounds a little like Animal Farm as conceived by Woody Guthrie, or Bruce Springsteen's take on Wind in the Willows."