Wilco, The Black Keys, and Amadou & Mariam will be among the bands playing at this year's Lollapalooza, the event's organizers have announced. The lineup for the three-day festival, to be held at Chicago's Grant Park, August 1-3, includes more than 100 artists, including Radiohead, The Raconteurs, Nine Inch Nails, and Kanye West.

"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."

Youssou N'Dour was in London this week to perform with his Super Etoile band at Indig02, and The Independent gives the show four stars. The paper sees Youssou's latest Nonesuch release, Rokku Mi Rokka (Give and Take), as "the weave of percussion, bass lines and quicksilver guitars with N'Dour's extraordinary voice that stands out. His singing is a rhythmic device as much as an emotional force."

The Magnetic Fields' Distortion tour may have come to a close, but that just means more time for Stephin Merritt to share another of his many talents: DJing. He stopped by the KCRW studios in his newly adopted hometown of Los Angeles this past Sunday to play guest DJ on Gary Calamar's late-night show.

Mandy Patinkin returns to Broadway, the site of his Tony Award-winning musical debut in Evita, his starring role in the original production of Stephen Sondheim's Sunday in the Park with George, and countless other performances, on May 19 for a one-night-only event to benefit the off-Broadway Classic Stage Company. He will be accompanied by his longtime pianist, Paul Ford, in this special solo performance at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre.

"Attack & Release may be the postage stamp that finally sends the music of The Black Keys around the world," exclaims the San Francisco Chronicle. Producer Danger Mouse "gives these guys a brilliant sheen, sort of like a pocket-size Zeppelin, and lets the band's brilliance shine through. This is one for year-end Top 10 lists already."

The Brad Mehldau Trio's take on Oasis's "Wonderwall" is NPR's Song of the Day today. The track appears on the Trio's new Live album, on which the musicians "sound unusually lively and exploratory," says NPR. "Live is the finest live recording Mehldau has made. Collected from a series of 2006 concerts, these performances return to what Mehldau and his band do best: conversational improvisation, with idiosyncratic arrangements that rethink the popular songbook."

The Black Keys rocked The Wiltern in Los Angeles last night, celebrating the release of their new album, Attack & Release, with a couple thousand fans. The Associated Press album review struggles to single out one song to recommend above the rest: "There are so many delightful songs here, it's hard to pick one. Let's go with 'Psychotic Girl,' a song so unlike anything the Keys have done it's startling ... a melange of familiar sounds spun into a new flavor of cotton candy we've never tasted before."

"There is no question what DVD you should snatch up this week. It's Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street," writes Rolling Stone film critic Peter Travers. "Directed by Tim Burton and starring his muse, Johnny Depp, the film version of Stephen Sondheim's Broadway classic is a bloody wonder, intimate and epic, horrific and heart-rending. Depp received an Oscar nomination as Best Actor and he deserved to win if Daniel Day-Lewis hadn't blown the category away in There Will Be Blood."