NPR: Live In Concert from NPR's All Songs Considered Podcast

Sinewy and powerful as ever, and backed by his longtime band, Nick Cave works the crowd like a revival preacher at half-speed during NPR Music's SXSW showcase at Stubb's in Austin, Texas.  Here are 3 songs from the set: "Jubilee Street" - "From Her To Eternity" and "Push The Sky Away."

Waxahatchee's Katie Crutchfield was tucked in a back room at Stubb's during SXSW on March 14.  She opened her 25-minute set with a string of fragile solo songs, each more delicate than the last. This was interior music, made of guts and nerves and other viscera we don't share easily.

An easy way to embrace Alt-J's idiosyncratic charm is to witness the band live; hear how often Joe Newman sings quietly and subtly, and get a feel for the prettiness at the core of Alt-J's songs.

Le1f is a New Yorker and Wesleyan graduate who raps, produces and happens to be observably out of the closet. His boundless, arty individuality pops out over every jittery beat; he stands out in virtually every possible way

Youth Lagoon's Trevor Powers is the band's sole member.  He layers strange but alluring synth textures under quirky melodies and simple pop beats, in the process creating an expansive and endlessly engrossing world of sonic curiosities.

Bands with big ideas work well at the Tiny Desk. Efterklang is a Danish group whose recent album Piramida took its members to an abandoned mining town between the North Pole and Norway. There, they recorded sounds of empty oil tanks, old pianos and pretty much anything they could strike or record.It's precisely that creative energy that led to Efterklang ransacking our kitchen utensils and desks in search of sound-making material. The band is a joy to witness live with a small orchestra, but i...

Hear the psych-rock trio douse a sold-out Washington, D.C., crowd in an epic wash of guitar noise during an hour-long performance at the Rock and Roll Hotel.

Hear the trippy pop group give a thrilling, sometimes chaotic live performance at the Rock and Roll Hotel in Washington, D.C. Along the way, Foxygen channels everyone from The Velvet Underground to The Rolling Stones and Ramones.

Ritter's new album, The Beast in Its Tracks, is by any definition a breakup record; he wrote it following his own divorce, and every song finds him picking through a relationship's wreckage in pursuit of root causes and a way forward. Hear him perform the album's songs live from New York City.

You're about to watch one of the best fiddlers on the planet and a subtle guitar master work their magic. For too many of us, Irish music is something that merely gets trotted out around this time of year, associated with St. Patrick's Day and the coming of spring — and made a cliche by commercialism and whatever other shallow notions make cliches what they are.But for a moment, stop, put aside your notion of jigs and reels, and just listen. Martin Hayes plays his fiddle with an exquisi...