With the song "A Few Words in Defense of Our Country," Randy Newman puts the current state of the union into context, as only he can do. He published the lyrics from the song in a New York Times op-ed piece earlier this year in response to the George Bush's own State of the Union address. Watch Randy perform "A Few Words" here.

A new list of the world's 100 greatest living geniuses features an eclectic group, with Philip Glass, in the top ten, joining the ranks of Nelson Mandela, Stephen Hawking, and, yes, Simpsons creator Matt Groening. According to The Guardian, an international consulting firm compiled the list after polling 4,000 Brits, and ranked the winners based on how much their work "turned conventional thinking on its head, the popular acclaim they received, their intellectual power, their achievements, and their cultural importance."

Nonesuch Records is happy to announce that the new album by The Magnetic Fields, Distortion, will be released on January 15, 2008. The band will perform a small
number of US tour dates in February and March. Specific details regarding venues and ticket pre-sales will be announced shortly.

Stephin Merritt has joined Rufus Wainwright, Imogen Heap, Brian Eno, and others in contributing tracks to Plague Songs, a UK compilation that pays homage, in song, to the Biblical plagues. He's written a little ditty about lice, or more precisely, "The Meaning of Lice," and Pitchfork says: "Only one man could successfully write and record a wistful, feel-good, disco-danceable, three-minute ode to parasites and pestilence—with a chorus that includes the word 'subcutaneous'—and that man is Stephin Merritt."

Rolling Stone Brazil has released its list of the 100 Best Brazilian Records of all time, and Caetano Veloso, with four records on the list, is among the artists garnering the most mentions. Earning the No. 2 slot on the album list is Tropicália or Panis et Circencis, the seminal 1968 album that introduced Veloso and Gilberto Gil as "artists searching for a universal language" to the world outside Brazil. Transa, which Caetano recorded during his exile in England in 1972, closes out the top 10. Veloso kicks off a North American tour in Boston on November 2.

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."

The Music Box review of the new Robert Plant / Alison Krauss collaboration, Raising Sand, saves his highest praise for the album's producer, T Bone Burnett. The review expects that fans of Burnett's work on Sam Phillips’s A Boot and a Shoe will appreciate Burnett's efforts on the new record. Included among the tracks is Philips's "Sister Rosetta Goes Before Us," which "is delivered as a moody hallucination that comes in the wake of crushing heartache." Her own version of the song will appear on her new album, Don't Do Anything, due early next year on Nonesuch. Burnett's own record is also slated for release next spring.

Just announced: Glenn Kotche will be opening for Andrew Bird, left, at New York's Beacon Theatre on Friday, November 30. Glenn will be performing the world premiere of his Anomaly with Kronos Quartet at the San Francisco Jazz Festival this Thursday, October 25.

Earlier this month, David Byrne joined Young @ Heart Chorus, a group of "gyrating geriatrics" (according to Time and the choir's own website), at their gig in NYC's Paris Bar. Byrne, by far the youngest person on stage (chorus members range in age from 72 to 88), joined in on the Talking Heads's "Heaven" and a new Byrne-penned tune, "One Fine Day." He reports on his blog that "the hipsters at the Paris Bar were completely won over, I think."

The LA Opera production of Brecht/Weill's Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, which starred Audra McDonald and Patti LuPone and ran through February 2007, will air December 17 as part of the Great Performances series on New York's PBS station Thirteen/WNET. It will be available on DVD the following day. The production was directed by John Doyle, who also helmed the recent Broadway revivals of Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd (starring LuPone) and Company.

David Byrne will be among 140 artists contributing to The Seed Project, in which participants create works of art starting with a humble bag of grass seeds, in an effort to promote sustainability. The resulting works will be on display in New York City for five weeks, opening Thursday, October 25, at the Winkleman Gallery.