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American singer-songwriter Ben Folds recently released a new album. Titled Way to Normal, the disc showcases one of the former Ben Folds Five frontman's most notable talents: writing songs about breakups.

Book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews The Americanization of Ben Franklin by Gordon S. Wood.

NPR's John Burnett sends a postcard from Ft. Benning, Ga., where he spent a week with a bunch of reporters undergoing training for war.

Ben and Leo Sidran release their new children's CD El Elefante. The collection of original songs is in English and Spanish. Father and son started working together when the son was a child, and the collaboration grew from that. Ben is more jazz influenced; Leo is more pop- and rock-oriented. The two talk about the fun they had creating the music with NPR's Melissa Block.

The Death Cab for Cutie frontman recently released his first solo album, which he says spans eight years, three relationships and two hometowns' worth of songwriting.

Clarinetist Ben Goldberg became known in the early 1990s as a member of the New Klezmer Trio. Goldberg's new album is a memorial to soprano-saxophonist Steve Lacy, who died two years ago. It shows how well Goldberg understands his subject.

Come up with a list of the dream writing jobs in comedy and at least three of them are likely to come up on one man's resume: Ben Karlin is executive producer of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and co-executive producer of The Colbert Report, both on the cable channel Comedy Central. Before that, Karlin was editor of the satirical weekly newspaper The Onion.

Performing solo in the NPR Music offices, the singer, songwriter and pianist performs three songs from his new album and two old favorites: "Emaline" and "One Angry Dwarf And 200 Solemn Faces."

Pianist Ben Folds has crafted a series of alt-rock hits over the past 15 years. For his pseudo-"greatest-hits" package, he's commissioned new arrangements of those songs from university a cappella groups across the country. Folds and host Jacki Lyden compare and contrast the various versions of his songs.

As a teenager, the singer-songwriter was already touring the world with his rock band. His new album takes him back to before then, when country music blasted out of Texas radio stations. He performs a solo acoustic set in NPR's Studio 4A.