It’s one of this year’s most unlikely collaborations. Shaggy is a Jamaican dance hall star with an unmistakable voice and raunchy hits like 1995’s “Boombastic” and 2000’s “It Wasn’t Me.” Rock star Sting, his partner, is a little more buttoned-up in comparison. But despite being from two different corners of the music world, the pair’s first collaboration album 44/876, out now, is a meeting of the minds — one that’s so unexpected, it works in their favor.

“I think surprise is always the most important element in all music,” Sting says. “You don’t want to just go with people’s expectations. You always want to surprise them … I listen to music expecting a surprise within eight measures.”

“We’re both allergic to boredom,” adds Shaggy.

At first, this team-up was unexpected even to them. Shaggy sent Sting a demo of the track “Don’t Make Me Wait” and they worked on it together in the studio. After enjoying the experience so much, they decided to repeat the process for a full-length album. Together, they knocked out 20 songs in six weeks. But in order to make it happen, Shaggy had to change the way he records.

“He does music on regular office hours,” the dance hall star says of Sting. “My creative process starts at 2 a.m. with a whole lot of weed.” But Shaggy admits the change to his schedule kept his mind fresh.

The guys have more in common than meets the eye. Sting’s band The Police pulled from reggae and dance hall influences for tracks like “Message in a Bottle.” Both musicians are U.S. immigrants: Shaggy moved from Jamaica to Brooklyn in the 1985 and fought in the first Gulf War in 1991 while Sting moved to the U.S. from his native England more than three decades ago. Though the record is filled with mostly sunny reggae songs, some tracks like “Dreaming in the U.S.A.” voice the artists’ concerns about life in the country today. The men believe that the idea of America, no matter how paradoxical, “is a pure one that needs to be protected.”

“The America of which I fought for, the America of which we fell in love with, the liberties [are threatened],” Shaggy says.

On the 12 songs that made the final cut of the album, it’s obvious that the two worked off each other’s strengths, Sting’s measured reflection balancing out Shaggy’s spontaneous and moral parables.

“Sharing a load on an album is a wonderful luxury,” Sting explains. “I think there’s something in there, although there are serious issues within the music but we’ve chosen to present them in a way that is attractive and optimistic.”

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Over the past 20 years, Souad Massi has sung provocative songs challenging authority and weaving stories in Arabic, French, and Kabyle, languages from her native Algeria. She’s never been afraid to take risks through her music. “You want to know all my secrets?” Massi asks. The Algerian artist laughs and says she has only the best.

While on tour in the United States, Massi spoke to NPR’s Ari Shapiro from KUOW in Seattle and performed three of her most powerful songs.

“I used to be a dreamer. I wanted to change the world. I was so shy and reserved. I didn’t know how to talk to people,” she explains. So instead, Massi found her outlet through music. She was 17 years old when she wrote her first song, 2001’s “Raoui.” The title means “Storyteller” in Arabic. Massi says she wrote it to forget her troubles and “just to fly away.”

Now, Massi is a celebrated international artist. In her 20s, she joined the political rock band Atokar — a rarity for a woman at the time — and eventually left Algeria for France due to government pressure. On her fifth album, 2015’s El Mutakallimun — “Masters of the Word” — Massi pays homage to the works of important Arab thinkers and poets stretching from the ancient past to present day. She hopes her music will not only bring peace and healing to Arabs, but all people.

“I was very sad to see and to hear what the media shows from the Muslim and Arabic world,” Massi says of the album’s mission. “We have very intelligent people who have a real gift for humanity. ”

Iraqi poet Ahmed Matar is one of Massi’s chosen poets. Matar spent much of his life in prison for supporting democracy in Kuwait, and now lives in exile in England. Massi says she wants to give a voice to Matar’s revolutionary poetry in “Ayna (The Visitor).”

The song describes an “enlightened leader” arriving before a large crowd and and asking them to tell him their grievances without fear. The song’s narrator describes “my friend Hassan” asking the leader about living conditions and then mysteriously disappearing. One year later, the leader reappears before the crowd. The narrator sings:

No one dared, and so I said:
“Where’s the bread and where’s the milk
And the guaranteed housing?
Where’s the employment for all
And the free healthcare?
And pardon me, O Excellency,
Where is my friend Hassan?”

Massi could have turned these words into a mournful tune, but instead the song almost sounds like a satire. She says that it’s common in African culture to give sad lyrics a buoyant melody. “We can make a song very… groovy,” she laughs.

Massi is no stranger to the pain and suffering that plagues the modern world. Though she is not the 17-year-old dreamer she once was, she finds hope when she sees people from all over the world at her shows.

“It is very hard to change the world,” Massi says. “We have to begin from ourselves to correct what is not good in us. And after that, we can help other people and we can try.”

NPR’s Linah Mohammad contributed to this report.

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After five years, Paul Van Haver is back with a melancholy new song that also serves as a promotional video for his newest clothing collection. “Défiler” [March] is Stromae‘s first official release in half a decade, since the release of his 2013 album Racine Carée [Square Root].

The clothing on display is the newest capsule collection for Mosaert, the unisex fashion line led by Stromae and his wife, designer Coralie Barbier.

As the Belgian artist’s French-speaking fans already know to expect, Stromae’s lyrics are packed with multiple layers of wordplay and meaning. With its dreamy electronic texture and plangent mood, “Défiler” contemplates movement — on the catwalk, in protest, in military formation, but also walking through one’s life and experiences. (The word “défiler” has several meanings in English: to march by, as soldiers or models would, and to pass by, as in years passing — and also to scroll, as one scrolls on a phone.)

“We walk in ranks,” he sings. “In groups or not, we walk alone. Like it or not, we have a market value, from childhood to the shroud.” He then goes on to address our visuals-first world: “Child, before learning a trade, you must first learn how to retouch the photo on the resume.”

The whole project is a family affair, apart from Stromae and Barbier’s fashion collaboration. The song, written and sung by Stromae, was arranged by his brother, Luc Junior Tam, who also serves as Mosaert’s creative director; Stromae, Barbier and Tam all appear at the end of the video to take a bow.

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The islands of the Cape Verde are notoriously barren, yet they’ve produced some of West Africa’s most enchanting singers. Ever since the death of diva Cesária Évora in 2011, fans have been waiting for another Cape Verdean singer with sublime poise and emotional power. We may have found her in Lucibela, a 32-year-old singer with a truly magnificent voice, liquid and effortless across a wide vocal range. Lucibela’s debut album Laço Umbilical is a joyful celebration of her homeland.

Some songs on the album, like “Chica di Nha Maninha” for example, are mornas; distinctly Cape Verdean ballads with the melancholy of Portuguese fado and a gentle lilt more akin to Brazilian or Afro-Caribbean music. Longing and sorrowful — sodade, as the locals call it — is a fact of life on these beautiful islands, where droughts and scarcity have forced so many to seek fortunes far away.

For all the separation and hardship they’ve endured, Cape Verdeans are ardent dancers and celebrators, evidenced in coladera, the other bright, buoyant local music showcased on Lucibela’s album.

The charm of Cape Verdean music is this alluring alchemy of joy and wistfulness. Lucibela knows this all too well. When she was just out of high school, Lucibela’s widowed mother died and she made her living singing in tourist hotels. Before she turned to mornas and coladeras, Lucibela sang jazz, rock and Brazilian bossa nova. Lucibela even incorporated bossa nova into her debut.

These days, Lucibela lives in Lisbon, Portugal — yet another Cape Verdean lured away from her beloved home. But as her album title, Laço Umbilical, suggests, there’s an umbilical cord that keeps her connected to her home country and it’s evident in every note on this gorgeous debut.

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Carlos do Carmo is known as the Sinatra of fado, Portugal’s national music. In 2014, do Carmo became the first Portuguese artist to receive a Latin Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. This past weekend, the 78-year-old singer made his New York debut at Town Hall NYC as part of Fado Festival New York.

Often called the Portuguese blues, fado (literally, “fate”) is emotional music. “People think that fado is connected with sadness only. It’s not true,” do Carmo says. There is fado menor — sad fado in minor — joyful fado and really joyful fado, sung in a major key. A corrido is an example of really joyful fado. “The ‘corrido’ is something you even can dance and there’s got to be a smile when you sing it,” do Carmo says.

Carlos do Carmo grew up in Lisbon, Portugal and is the son of Lucília do Carmo, one of the great singers of the golden age of fado, which began in the late 1920s. His mother’s club in Lisbon became a gathering place for all of the older fado singers, says musicologist and author Rui Vieira Nery.

“He absorbed that tradition, but then he went on to re-process that heritage and he was always very curious about the interaction between fado and other genres,” Vieira Nery, the author of A History of Portuguese Fado, explains. Vieira Nery cites the singer’s keenness on Frank Sinatra and “the crooners.”

“Sinatra was the best fado singer I ever heard,” do Carmo says. “I mean it. You heard Sinatra. The same song in different records — never the same song. That’s fado.”

Do Carmo took Sinatra’s approach and applied it to his own records. Until do Carmo came along in the early 1960s, fado was usually performed by a singer and two guitarists. He brought in the orchestra.Vieira Nery says do Carmo also invited musicians who were outside the scene to compose music for fados.

“He managed to attract people from pop rock, from jazz, from art music and convinced them to actually try to get into the language of fado and write melodies for fado, just as much as he attracted some of the very best contemporary poets to write for him,” Vieira Nery says.

Ary dos Santos was one of those poets. In 1977, three years after the collapse of Portugal’s Estado Novo dictatorship, the two men collaborated on an album called Um Homem na Cidade — A Man in the City.

“We lived in a dictatorship for almost 50 years. There were censorship. So if you sing under censorship, you can’t express yourself. And I lived that, I know what I’m talking about. It’s terrible, it humiliates you,” do Carmo says. “My good friend Ary dos Santos, that was a very, very good popular poet. We had an idea together: Let’s make an album about Lisbon in freedom.”

Before that album came out, fado had become old-fashioned, aligned with the regime even as do Carmo was pushing its boundaries. Um Homem na Cidade was a watershed. It was a call to artists, poets and musicians according to director of the Museu do Fado, Sara Pereira.

“Carlos was fundamental, so that [the people] could understand that fado … it can also be a song of intervention, can also be a song of protest,” she says.

Vieira Nery believes that do Carmo has helped ensure that the fado tradition will live on. And whether a fado is sad or happy, do Carmo says the music has to be deep; the lyrics have to be strong and go straight to the heart.

“For me, it’s life, love, it’s my entire life, fulfilling my dreams, the love of my hometown, the love of my country,” do Carmo says.

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Just about everyone at NPR Music’s favorite discovery from SXSW this year was Brittney Parks, who records as Sudan Archives.

Today, the singer, violinist and electronic musician has a new song, “Nont For Sale,” a title inspired by a sign she saw on a Ghana hillside that read: “THIS LAND IS NONT FOR SALE.” It comes to us from her new EP, Sink, due at the end of May.

Brittney Parks grew up in Ohio playing the violin, often picking out melodies from her time in a church choir. At age 17, still living in Cincinnati, she told her mom that she didn’t like her name; so, with a love for African jewelry and stylings, her mom gave her a new nickname, Sudan. A late-teen rebellious streak contributed to an alienation from her religious family, prompting a relocation to Los Angeles. It was there that she began exploring Sudanese music, and the violin traditions within it. They spoke to her, so she studied, incorporating those sounds’ contours with a love for electronics.

“Nont For Sale” is anchored by Sudan’s plucked violin, looped and punctuated by drummachine finger snaps and her swinging, clear voice. In fact, Parks describes the free-flowing swagger flowing through the song (and the whole EP) in a press release as “the way I want my music to make you feel.” She writes, “It’s inspired by my love of fluidity, movement of jellyfish and water.”

The EP Sink is set for release May 25 via Stones Throw.

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Of the many (we’ll get to that) famed North African guitarists, Bombino has, over the past near-decade, seemed to be the most willing to kitchen-sink his sound, to give his music a modernist momentum and panoramic scope.

On “Deran Deran Alkheir,” his homage to a Tuareg wedding song, the drums are recorded deep, fast and loud, giving the song’s thrust a counter-intuitive aggression that wouldn’t be out of place on a Dead Rider song. Everywhere else, in the claps and the chants and the signature and mesmerizing thicket of Bombino’s guitar is a clear celebration. The song almost sounds like a gaggle of overexcited children, play-fighting and rolling down a hill, laughing all the way through the tumble.

But always, it comes down to that guitar, four-armed and bristling, nothing less than a constant homage to the inextinguishable light of human energy. The region’s famed guitarists and guitar-focused bands are legion — Songhoy Blues, Doueh, Sidi Touré, Ali Farka Touré, Tinariwen, Imharhan — and invariably astounding. Each is distinct, some from different traditions, some from shared histories. But the old influences the new and the historical, musical relationship between their work is clear.

Bombino doesn’t distinguish himself from this company through his modesty or his pure love of making music, qualities that seem to be universal within this community, but in his seizing of opportunities to augment these shared traditions — “tuareggae” and recording with David Longstreth of the Dirty Projectors. Here, even with his reinterpretation of a traditional song, that forward focus is plain.

Deran comes out May 18 via Partisan Records.

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