Congratulations to Shawn Colvin, who will receive the Lifetime Achievement Trailblazer Award at the 2016 Americana Honors & Awards ceremony at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville on September 21. Also among the six Lifetime Achievement Award honorees are Billy Bragg, this year's recipient of the Spirit of Americana Free Speech Award, and Woody Guthrie, the posthumous recipient of this year's President's Award. It was announced earlier this year that the Duo/Group of the Year nominees include both Lake Stree Dive and Emmylou Harris & Rodney Crowell.

Conor Oberst, whose new album, Ruminations, is due October 14, will perform songs from the album on tour in Europe in early 2017. The intimate solo tour begins with a performance at Postpalast in Munich on January 17, followed by stops in Stuttgart, Vienna, Zurich, Cologne, Oslo, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Berlin, Paris, Utrecht, Brussels, London, Manchester, Edinburgh, and Dublin. The shows follow Oberst's US tour this autumn.

The Staves performed an intimate live show of songs from their album If I Was and EP Sleeping In A Car at NYC's Rockwood Music Hall for a lucky few WFUV members earlier this month. The full set, including a conversation with WFUV host Russ Boris, is available now at wfuv.org. "The beauty of three-part harmony has a long and rich history: the Beatles' John, Paul and George; David, Graham and Stephen of CSN; and Emmylou, Linda and Dolly," says Boris. "But there’s something incredibly special about the voices of The Staves."

Devendra Banhart, whose new album, Ape in Pink Marble, is due out September 23, has unveiled a second track off the album: "Saturday Night," which can be heard here. The track is also available to download now with pre-orders of the new album—which Uncut calls "excellent"—on iTunes and in the Nonesuch Store, along with the previously released album opener, "Middle Names." Nonesuch Store CD and vinyl pre-orders also include an exclusive, limited-edition autographed print of a drawing by Banhart.

Chris Thile, who will take over for Garrison Keillor as the new host of the beloved public radio program A Prairie Home Companion this fall, has announced a few of the musicians who will join him as the show's house band, along with pianist Rich Dworsky. Among them are two of Thile's fellow Punch Brothers: Chris Eldridge on guitar and Paul Kowert on bass. You can watch Thile give a snapshot of the house band in the video from the show here. Thile will host the new season of A Prairie Home Companion beginning on October 15.

BBC Culture has just released its list of the 100 Greatest Films of the 21st Century so far, and among them are three films by Paul Thomas Anderson—There Will Be Blood, The Master, and Inherent Vice, all of which feature scores by Jonny Greenwood—along with Richard Linklater's Boyhood, Joel and Ethan Coen's Inside Llewyn Davis, and Darren Aronofsky's Requiem for a Dream, for all six of which Nonesuch Records released the film soundtracks. BBC Culture says: "Film-making today, whether massively expensive or made with tiny budgets, shot on celluloid or video is thriving artistically as much as it ever has."

Nonesuch Records releases Confessions, a collaboration between the acclaimed American composer Nico Muhly and the Faroese singer/songwriter Teitur, on October 21, 2016; the vinyl is due November 4. The two musicians began work on the project when Muhly was composer-in-residence at Muziekgebouw Eindhoven in the Netherlands. The songs' lyrics were inspired by or culled from video and commentary the pair found on YouTube. Confessions was recorded with Holland Baroque and is available to preorder with an instant download of the track "Describe You," which you can hear here. Muhly and Teitur will perform songs from the album with New York Baroque Incorporated at (le) Poisson Rouge in NYC on October 21.

Laurie Anderson released her Nonesuch Records debut album 15 years ago today, August 21, 2001. It's "sparse, haunted, intimate," said Rolling Stone of the album. "Laurie Anderson is a singer-songwriter of crushing poignance." With Life on a String, she turned her view inward, creating one of the most personal recordings of her career; she played violin on a record for the first time since her debut album, Big Science. Guest musicians include Bill Frisell, Lou Reed, and Van Dyke Parks. You can hear the album's title track here.

Kronos Quartet tours Europe, from Slovakia to Spain ... The Arcs play a free show in Montauk ... Lake Street Dive continues its Side Pony tour in Colorado, at Red Rocks and Steamboat Springs ... Conor Oberst is in Colorado too, headlining the Rocky Mountain Folks Festival ...Punch Brothers perform at Children's Cancer Association benefit in Oregon ... and more ...

Nonesuch releases John Adams's Scheherazade.2 on September 30, 2016. The 50-minute "dramatic symphony" was written for the violinist Leila Josefowicz, who performs it here with the St. Louis Symphony led by Music Director David Robertson; Chester Englander is the cimbalom soloist. In the piece, Adams imagines a modern day Scheherazade, an "empowered, liberated spirit embodied in the multifaceted solo violin role," he says. "Scheherazade.2 is also a virtuoso romantic symphony-concerto on the grand scale which acknowledges its predecessors in works by Sibelius, Prokofiev, Bartók, and Berg." He and Josefowicz will perform Scheherazade.2 with orchestras in Europe this fall.

Emmylou Harris will tour North America this fall with special guests Steve Earle, Patty Griffin, Buddy Miller, and The Milk Carton Kids (not all artists will appear at all venues). The 11-stop tour, Lampedusa: Concerts for Refugees, will raise awareness for the unprecedented worldwide refugee crisis. Jesuit Refugee Service/USA (JRS) will host this singer/songwriter tour in support of the organization's Global Education Initiative. "After witnessing firsthand the work of JRS in Ethiopia this past June, I have never been more inspired to champion such a critical cause," said Harris. "The better angels of our nature call upon us to act with compassion and not with fear in the face of so much suffering."

Kronos Quartet released its Nonesuch Records debut album 30 years ago today, August 15, 1986. The self-titled album includes works by Peter Sculthorpe, Aulis Sallinen, Philip Glass, Conlon Nancarrow, and Jimi Hendrix. The Washington Post praised the group's "breadth of vision" throughout a collection "devoted to some of the most imaginative music of our time." The New York Times called it "the best recorded anthology yet to capture the heady diversity of musical idioms that this San Francisco quartet espouses."