You can stream this month’s mix here or through NPR Music’s SoundCloud account. If you’d rather just hear each song individually, check out the playlist below.

You can keep up with our favorite discoveries on Twitter by following @Sami_Yenigun and @spotieotis.

Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Eleanor writes via email: “You’ve tweeted about your hatred of the word ‘songstress.’ Writing about music is tricky, but what words do you think should ALWAYS be avoided, and why?”

Okay, let’s start with “songstress.” I see this awful, awful word so much, and it sets my teeth on edge every time I encounter it. It’s so twee and infantilizing and pointlessly, unnecessarily gendered — look, everyone, a lady is singing a song! — that I’ve taken to attacking it frequently on social media in the hopes that others may join my cause. There’s a big poster on a pillar by my desk with various dos and don’ts and journalistic pet peeves (because I’m that guy), and right at the top are the words, “Never use songstress.” God, what a gross word.

My No. 1 rule of writing about music — and lord knows I’ve broken it once or twice in the past 20-plus years — is to make sure you’re always saying something. Provide backstory and context, try to establish a sense of the music’s essence, and state actual, specific opinions. Don’t take your eye off the ball and go on about how crazy it is that a band sounds a certain way even though it’s from Town X, or wade into the weeds of record-label minutiae that rarely captivate anyone unfamiliar with the inner workings of the music industry. Don’t talk down to people, but don’t assume everyone’s as obsessed as you are, either. In the spirit of “songstress,” avoid words you’d never say out loud.

A specific “forbidden words” list is harder to come by than these general guidelines, and each stickler will be more than happy to issue a spittle-flecked list of his or her own. I know people who can’t abide “chanteuse.” I know people who purge the word “indie” whenever possible, or soft phrases like “sort of.” For me, though, the biggest recurring no-no is probably flabby phrases that mean nothing, “garnering acclaim” being a particular non-favorite. (See also: “a growing fan base” and every other phrase that translates to, “Someone somewhere likes this music.”)

Your internal editor may vary — as might your actual editor, should you be writing about music professionally. So ask around, listen to why certain words have fallen out of favor, and understand that there’s only one immutable rule that must never be broken under any circumstances: Never use songstress.

Got a music-related question you want answered? Leave it in the comments, drop us an email at allsongs@npr.org or tweet @allsongs.

Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

You can stream this month’s mix here or NPR Music’s SoundCloud account. If you’d rather just hear each song individually, check out the playlist below.

You can keep up with our favorite discoveries on Twitter by following @Sami_Yenigun and @spotieotis.

Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

William F. writes via Facebook: “What do you do if you’re a diehard fan of a musician and his new release turns out to be… not very good? How do you deal with the other fans who are falling all over themselves to outdo one another in praising the artist? Especially when the latest work, well, kinda sucks? I have been listening to live tracks on YouTube to Morrissey’s forthcoming album World Peace Is None of Your Business. The tracks he is playing are just boring, but I’m afraid to open my mouth with other fans so as not to turn it into a fight.”

Before getting to the meat of my advice — note: my advice contains no actual meat and is thus Morrissey-safe — I feel duty-bound to offer the tiny reassurance that live tracks on YouTube are a terrible way to experience a new album. You’re getting shaky recordings of what could well be shaky performances of songs you’ve never heard before, from a record you may or may not grow to like once you hear it when it comes in two months. I can’t encourage you enough to avoid catastrophizing your feelings about the album at this stage of the game.

But let’s say, for the sake of argument, that you ultimately come to loathe World Peace Is None of Your Business. I think it’s important for you to interrogate the difference between “feelings to which you’re entitled” and “feelings you feel obligated to express,” and to examine where and when your disappointment becomes an itch that must be scratched publicly. Any time you put an opinion into the world, it never hurts to weigh the degree to which you’re willing to fight to defend it; to weigh the extent to which doing so is worth it. If you truly fear a fight, you’re under no obligation to start one, you know? When asked point-blank for an opinion, you can say, “Eh, this new stuff isn’t clicking with me quite yet” and leave at that.

I understand that this becomes especially tricky for people who’ve integrated themselves into online fan communities, where fervency can feel competitive and even muted dissent can feel antagonistic. And I don’t mean to suggest that, as a diehard fan, your options are only to say nice things or remain silent. You have every right to whatever opinion you wish, whether you’re a diehard or a dissenter, and you certainly needn’t lie in the interest of going along to get along.

But, because you’re specifically looking to avoid confrontation in this specific situation, I encourage you to play conscientious objector, remain courteous toward opinions with which you disagree, allow time for your mind to change, and focus your contributions to the conversation on areas in which you feel comfortable. The world isn’t starved for people willing to criticize Morrissey, you know?

Got a music-related question you want answered? Leave it in the comments, drop us an email at allsongs@npr.org or tweet @allsongs.

Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Kendra Williams writes via Facebook: Are we as music listeners too harsh when we refer to bands/artists as “sellouts”? Should we be hesitant to keep our favorite unknown artists from reaching fame if we feel as if popular culture will ruin them?

Almost invariably, calling a band a “sellout” is a gesture of vanity on the part of the person launching the accusation; it’s about positioning oneself as ideologically pure and incorruptible, with the added bonus of disparaging an artist perceived as uncool along the way. Consequently, it’s rarely worth the trouble of arguing when the word pops up, not least because it’s lost so much of its meaning.

My favorite story along these lines took place more than a decade ago, when some stranger ranted to my friend Nathan, describing the band The Promise Ring as a bunch of worthless sellouts. “Did you know,” this guy asked Nathan, “that those guys made fifty thousand dollars last year?” Nathan replied, as any rational person would, by doing a little bit of math — $50,000 divided by four puts each member at or below the poverty line — but the other guy would hear none of it. The Promise Ring was getting written up in magazines and selling out midsize clubs, and had therefore become the machine against which we should rage.

A couple years later, I got a chance to tell this story to The Promise Ring’s former singer, Davey von Bohlen, who cracked up extravagantly. “Really?” he asked. He could barely spit out the next words: “We never made $50,000 in a year!”

This was more than a decade ago — during the Napster boom, but before Spotify or YouTube — and conditions for bands have by no means improved in the years since. Now more than ever, in order for independent musicians to make a living, they have to pick several mostly low-paying items off a large menu: touring, songwriting royalties, soundtrack placements, TV commercials, online streaming, merchandise, Kickstarter and IndieGoGo campaigns, corporate gigs, advances from record labels, production work on the side and so on.

If that sounds like a lot of potential revenue streams, consider this: I once got to peek at the contract for a well-known independent musician’s contract with the producers of a popular cable drama. The show wanted to use the musician’s song in a prominent scene, and needed blanket rights to put it on the show — which could itself be sold on DVD and via any medium that will ever be invented in perpetuity throughout the universe. The fee to the musician, for a prominent placement on a hit show: $1,500, of which management and publishing would get a cut.

These stories are everywhere — these examples are the tip of a not-very-lucrative iceberg — and yet some fans still blanch when a song they love pops up in a Volkswagen commercial. I totally understand the queasiness when an artist seems to get subsumed by a brand — when an album is launched in a way that makes it seem like a product subsidiary, for example — but music remains one of the few professions in which practitioners are resented for making enough money to rent a modest one-bedroom apartment.

To answer your second question, about the perils of our favorite underground artists reaching fame and changing in ways that don’t suit our tastes, I’m always — always — willing to take my chances. If an artist I love is able to put food on his or her table and perpetuate a career, I will never object to suffering the indignity of hearing amazing music in TV commercials.

Got a music-related question you want answered? Leave it in the comments, drop us an email at allsongs@npr.org or tweet @allsongs.

Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

You can stream this month’s mix here or on NPR Music’s SoundCloud account. If you’d rather just hear each song individually, check out the playlist below. (But seriously, listen to the mix.)

Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Nanna writes via Facebook: “This Valentine’s Day, I will attend a formal thrown for freshman and sophomore college students in the Netherlands — they are giving us, the lecturers, free drinks, so how could I not? — and I’m already massively looking forward to observing awkward late-teens eyeing each other and trying to flirt. What would be the best soundtrack to this particular event?”

Every week, the pop charts are lubricated with the sticky agony of youth — even when the songs themselves don’t capture the specifics of awkward teenage fumbling. As I type this, you’ll see everything from Pharrell Williams’ Oscar-nominated cheer-up anthem “Happy” to John Legend’s traditionalist R&B ballad “All of Me,” and I could picture either song fitting in alongside the fraught emotions and tense dramas of a gymnasium full of teenagers.

What makes a given song speak to the emotions of current young people is, at least in part, a product of the fact that it’s ubiquitous at the exact time when today’s young people are the age they are. There’s a chicken-and-egg thing happening here, and when you’re picking a soundtrack for listeners of pop music, sometimes it makes sense not to overthink it. More to the point, it makes sense for those listeners to pick the music themselves.

While I think you’re overestimating the awkwardness of college students — if these were freshmen and sophomores in high school, then we’d be talkin’ — your letter still brings to mind an important issue about teenagers’ cultural independence that I’m just addressing myself. Given that my son turns 13 in exactly one week, I’ve been thinking about this sort of thing a lot lately.

I’ve been covering pop culture of various kinds for more than 20 years, and I’ve been a parent for roughly two-thirds of that time, so I’ve fielded a lot of questions about raising culturally well-rounded children. Those questions almost invariably revolve around how best to imprint our tastes onto the lives we’ve created; how to share our loves so that they may be passed down to future generations, thus (among other things) granting immortality to the things we enjoy.

And that’s fine, and it’s sweet, and it’s well-intentioned, and it’s understandable. Many of my children’s cultural loves do come straight from my own past and present obsessions, from The Simpsons to vintage arcade games to The Princess Bride to “Weird Al” Yankovic. But there comes a point — the arrival of adolescence is as good a catalyst as any — when culture ought to become a full-fledged exchange between generations. Part of letting kids grow up and become their own individuals is letting them call their own cultural shots — and, more to the point, welcoming the things they love into our own lives.

My kids love Pokémon, and I typically couldn’t care less about Pokémon, but I’ve watched the cartoons with them and studied up on the approximately nine million characters. My kids love a TBS reality competition called King of the Nerds, and now so do I, and we watch it together religiously. (We were all equally crushed when Josh, the menschy Pokémon master, was eliminated.) My son came to me recently and asked if we could attend a concert together by a band called Walk Off The Earth; I didn’t know much about its music, which he’d heard by scouring YouTube, but now I’m a fan because we had so much fun at the show. Opening myself to my kids’ cultural individuality broadens my own horizons, and we’ve had a blast together making that happen.

All of which brings me back to my point at the very beginning: Let the kids at the dance listen to their own damn music. I know I’m coming at this from the perspective of a neurotic parent rather than a hormonal anthropologist — and from someone dealing with a future 13-year-old rather than a roomful of 19-year-olds — but the lessons are the same. Much as we try to imprint our own music (and our own nostalgia) on kids, it’s far fairer to let them start fresh with their own as much as possible. They’ll be teaching us soon enough, so we might as well give them a head start.

Got a music-related question you want answered? Leave it in the comments, drop us an email at allsongs@npr.org or tweet @allsongs.

Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

So here’s where we submit a humble request: If you’re an artist playing SXSW, or if you represent an artist playing SXSW — especially if you’re not a name we’re likely to know — please send us ONE song (via MP3) to represent your sound. And, because nothing says “Thank you for helping us do our jobs” quite like a bunch of fussy ground rules, here are some fussy ground rules:

1) You must actually be playing SXSW festivities this year. We do listen and look for discoveries year-round, but this project is SXSW-specific. Please actually be in town and performing in Austin between March 11 and March 15.

2) Please email MP3s — no WMV files or WAVs, please — with a bit rate in the 256-320 range.

3) Please send us only one song per artist — no zip files with entire albums, please — either as an email attachment or through a service like Dropbox or Hightail. Links to Soundcloud or YouTube or other streaming services are of no use to us here; we’re blazing through this stuff on our iPods and car stereos, so we need to be able to take the songs offline.

4) Please make sure your songs have appropriate iTunes metadata (artist, song title, album title), and include that information in your email just in case. Please also include an email address and phone number, because if we do wind up using your music in our SXSW coverage, we’re going to ask for your permission before making it available to the public.

5) Unfortunately, we won’t have time to confirm receipt or otherwise offer follow-ups or feedback. We will listen to it, promise, but we’ll only reach out if we end up using it. We’re only able to cover a tiny fraction of the artists playing the festival, but we do give everything as fair a shot as time allows.

So, where do you send your MP3? We’ve set up a Gmail account for this very occasion, solely for this purpose: npratsxsw, followed by “gmail.com.” Please use it judiciously, and thank you so much for helping us out. See you at SXSW!

Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Our inaugural mix actually looks back at December and January. Unlike other corners of the music industry, the dance world doesn’t really slow down over the holidays. Disclosure dropped a remixed version of its album Settle, which included an incredible Larry Heard remix of “Help Me Lose My Mind.” Theo Parrish and Moodymann, both legends in the Detroit techno scene, released some of their best material in January. Then there was the psychedelic dance whirlwind from Brazilian producer seixlacK that appeared on Bandcamp out of nowhere.

The mix begins with Holly Herndon’s vocal ribbon manipulation, “Solo Voice,” slowly rising in energy and tempo, until the frenetic pace of seixlacK’s techno is snapped by the cool movement of Ulf Lohmann’s “Sicht,” the lead track on Kompakt’s new Pop Ambient 2014 compilation. It’s a warm-up and cool-down that’s condensed to fit the form, a bite-sized story arc meant to make you move.

Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Bradd Jenkins writes via email: “Sometimes when I’m at a concert or a festival, I find myself listening to the opener and very much enjoying their music. The only problem is, I look up their back catalog and realize that they have eight albums — and I have no idea where to jump in! Not knowing anything about the band, I don’t know the titles of the songs I enjoyed at the festival, so I’m at a bit of a loss. I most recently experienced this issue with Devendra Banhart, whom I saw in Monterey, Calif., last summer. Any advice on how to start exploring a new (to me) artist’s back catalog in the most efficient way possible? Highest ratings, highest sales, something else?”

The best first step when exploring a new-to-you artist is to use your own limited experience as a guide. For example, you discovered that you like Devendra Banhart when you watched him perform during the summer of 2013. Even if you can’t find a set list online, chances are pretty good that he was leaning heavily on songs from his very solid, then-new album — and, given that you know you like those songs, picking up Mala is a sensible place to start. (His set list from the night before he performed in Monterey is heavily dominated by songs from that record.)

Exploring a band’s catalog in chronological order (or reverse chronological order) makes a certain amount of narrative sense, particularly in cases where you’ve consistently liked everything you’ve heard by an artist. But there’s no one right approach, particularly when the artist is as unpredictable — even erratic — as Devendra Banhart. Pick a spot anywhere in Banhart’s catalog, and you might get a searingly beautiful lament like 2004’s “At the Hop,” which happens to be one of my favorite songs of the ’00s. But if you pick a spot just one year later, you might land on a bit of free-spirit sloganeering like “Long Haired Child,” which undercuts his sincerity to a degree I find incredibly frustrating. You can’t always count on consistency.

Once you’ve taken the aforementioned first step — tracking down the album which contains the songs you know you love — then I recommend gleaning digestible highlights during a trip down the online rabbit hole of your choice. YouTube’s algorithm for links it thinks you might like is often a reasonably solid way to wend your way through key moments in an artist’s catalog. Scanning Banhart’s archive at NPR Music, he performed on World Cafe in 2005, 2007 and 2010 — three approachably sized snapshots of points on his circuitous creative path — which gives you a way to skim for favorites without investing tons of time or money.

For those with a decent amount of technology at their disposal, it’s never been easier to become a musical dilettante; to glean a working knowledge of a given artist while bored at work, lying in bed with your laptop or even fiddling with your smartphone in a waiting room. Don’t be afraid to dig in and discover — and to let a love of what you find lead you to clues that might reveal ever more voices worth exploring.

Got a music-related question you want answered? Leave it in the comments, drop us an email at allsongs@npr.org or tweet @allsongs.

Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.