Before hitting the road again in Ottawa, Ontario, this weekend for the next leg of the Watershed tour, k.d. lang will stop by the Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson tonight on CBS. Also scheduled to appear on tonight's show: actress Laura Dern. The show starts at 12:35 AM ET/PT. 

Steve Reich is the featured composer for Tokyo Opera City's Composium 2008, part of the Contemporary Music Festival beginning today and running through Sunday. Ensemble Modern and Synergy Vocals perform in two sold-out, all-Reich concerts at the Opera's Concert Hall, with Brad Lubman conducting, including the Japanese premiere of Daniel Variations as well as a performance of the seminal work Music for 18 Musicians featuring the composer as guest performer. The event also includes a discussion with the composer and the selection of the 2008 Toru Takemitsu Composition Award.

Last Friday, Kronos Quartet performed composer Terry Riley's Sun Rings at two events in Germany. The Quartet's latest Nonesuch release also features a work by the composer, The Cusp of Magic. The piece, says JamBase, "delivers subtlety and tenderness in exchange for open ears and hearts. Far from the gravity and self-importance of classical/art-music, the album ... deals in a light playfulness that won't fail to rub off."

The Black Keys are in the UK on the European leg of their Attack & Release tour. To coincide with their performance tonight at ABC in Glasgow, Scotland, BBC Radio 1's Zane Lowe will broadcast an in-studio performance and interview with the band tonight on his show, sometime between 7 and 9 PM GMT. The show will also feature an extra track tomorrow night at the same time. 

Sam Phillips's Don't Do Anything hits stores in two weeks, and today, the album track "Little Plastic Life" was named Today's Top Tune by KCRW, 89.9 FM, out of Santa Monica, and kcrw.com online.

Emmylou Harris's new album, All I Intended to Be, is due out on June 10, but you can pre-order your copy now. You'll be able to download the album MP3s on release date, at no additional cost, and receive the CD on or around the same day. This is Emmylou's third solo release on Nonesuch and her first solo effort since 2003's Stumble Into Grace. Of the material she selected for the album, Harris explains, "I've always seen myself as a relentless song-finder, a singer of other people's work whom I admire greatly, and an occasional songwriter." Recorded over a four-year span primarily at producer Brian Ahern's Easter Island Surround in Nashville, for the first time in 25 years, this album returns Harris to the producer she worked with for her first 11 albums.

Made in Dakar, Orchestra Baobab's first album of new recordings since 2002's Grammy-nominated Specialist in All Styles, hits stores in the United States today. Rolling Stone gives Made in Dakar four stars, with reviewer Will Hermes writing that "with this collection of burbling grooves, these Senegalese legends recapture the Afro-Cuban bliss of their 1982 classic, Pirates Choice---imagine the Buena Vista Social Club weaned on motherland polyrhythms." Hermes points to guitarist Barthélemy Attisso as the band's "secret weapon," calling him "a guitar giant with a touch as delicate and melodically sublime as Jerry Garcia's" and describing his performances on two particular tracks as "so chill they'll buckle your knees."

Today marks the release of Pat Metheny's new Tokyo Day Trip Live EP. The collection contains five tracks originally made available online as bonus tracks for Pat's recently released trio album Day Trip, with Christian McBride and Antonio Sanchez. "There was such an outpouring of demand from listeners," Pat explains, "that we decided to compile the recordings all in one place and release them together as a set."

While Wilco's next scheduled tour date is a couple months away, folks are still talking about the band's May 14 show that took over the streets of downtown Lawrence, Kansas. The venue was a makeshift stage set up where 10th Street meets New Hampshire, and JamBase's Nathan Rodriguez writes that it was a "cause for celebration" among the locals.

Adding yet another hyphenated credit to his name, T Bone Burnett plays guest DJ on the latest episode of NPR's All Songs Considered. Host Bob Boilen introduces T Bone as "a musical wizard of sorts" for all his many diverse and successful musical forays, before the two discuss a range of topics, including Burnett's producing methods, a few things he learned from the late Roy Orbison, and the differences between analog and digital recording.

Filter magazine rates Attack & Release a 93, with reviewer Patrick Strange saying the new album seems to have "dropped out of the heavens with a fistful of downright biting blues-rock." The album, reads the review, "has all the cadence of honest-to-God Southern balladeers (via the band's hometown of Akron, Ohio) and production that makes every bass kick and guitar clash a rustic-Technicolor wonder."

Wilco set in for a three-night residency at the The Pageant in St. Louis starting last Thursday. The sold-out shows marked the last tour dates from the band till the end of July, and, reports Daniel Durchholz in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, "Thursday's set dipped deep into Wilco's catalog and demonstrated the emotional depth and musical breadth of one of America's great bands."