Healing magic was the first subject Lila Downs planned to research for her thesis in anthropology at the University of Minnesota. But the brujo (medicine man) that the Mexican American hoped to study in her mother's native region of Oaxaca could not be found. So she wrote about textiles instead.

On Tuesday, the folksinger offers an alternative thesis on witchcraft with her latest album, Shake Away (Manhattan Records).

She was looking to heal herself. "I wanted to have a baby and I couldn't," she reveals over the phone from Califas. For a time, she wondered why she came into the world, if not to give birth to a child in turn. "My last album was a big party, to take away the pain. This time I was looking for a cure in the magic of my people."

Downs returned to Oaxaca to seek out 70-year-old Doña Queta, a woman known for her healing powers. Doña Queta intuited Downs's fear: She knew that not being able to have a child had shaken the confidence Downs always felt as a singer. "She told me to talk to my body, to caress my breasts," Downs relates. "Sometimes we forget to love ourselves."

The singer also revisited the sacred symbol of the serpent that has held special meaning not only in her culture, but for her own family. Her grandmother used to say that her father, an American, was a wind serpent, who entangled with her mother, a water serpent.

Downs herself used to have a terrifying recurring dream about a snake biting her.

Making Shake Away, Downs decided to embrace her fears and surrender herself to the serpent. In the process, she says, she discovered the source of her power: "Even though I can't have children, I'm a she-wolf."

The clearest declaration of power on the album is Downs's cover of "Black Magic Woman," where she revels in the role of the mysterious witch in the Santana classic. Growling deep at the bottom of her register, there is no doubt that the singer is a she-wolf. But just to emphasize the point, she switches from English to the indigenous tongue of Oaxaca to close the song with a magical chant.

As always with Downs's work, Shake Away ranges widely across themes, genres, and vocal styles. In addition to magic-drenched tracks like "Ojo de Culebra" (Eye of the Serpent), there are protest anthems such as "Minimum Wage" (a country tune in English in the voice of a migrant laborer) and "Justicia" (Justice), a simmering rock duet with Spanish pop star Enrique Bunbury. There are two beautiful covers, in English and Spanish, of Lucinda Williams's gorgeous love ballad "I Envy the Wind."

Then there's "Los Pollos" (The Chickens), my favorite track on the album, a very silly duet with Gilberto Gutierrez, of the Vera Cruz folk outfit Grupo Mayo Blanco, that warns all roosters and hens in the neighborhood to run because someone's going to be stewing chicken and rice that afternoon.

Co-produced by Downs and her husband and long-time collaborator Paul Cohen, Shake Away is more proof that, with the music they've made together, the couple has bequeathed a lasting and inspiring legacy to the rest of the world.

Celeste Fraser Delgado writes about Latin music and the American Dream for MOLI.

When I first discovered Delta Spirit, a group from San Diego known for their soulful Americana rock and energetic live shows, I thought of another of my favorite bands-Kings of Leon. But thanks to lead singer Matt Vasquez's emotion-filled voice and passionate, spiritually-themed lyrics there's really no confusing the two-or mistaking Delta Spirit for any other band of the moment for that matter.

Fitting their distinct, jamboree-style sound (a recent audience member ripped the fender off their trailer and used it to play along) is a back story that reads like music world urban legend. Back in 2005 Jonathan Jameson, (bass) Brandon Young (drums) and Sean Walker (guitar) decided they wanted to start a band. Young was walking through a park late one night when he noticed a guy singing on a bench (Vasquez) and got his contact info. When he told Jameson about the talented busker, it turned out that he had already approached that same guy, too. Obviously a higher power was at work.

Benjamin Franklin: "If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are dead and rotten, either write something worth reading or do things worth the writing."

I am reminded of this sage observation after reading a recent Salon.com piece on the exploits of performance artist Michael Townsend, his wife, artist Adriana Yoto, and the six other members of the Rhode Island art collective, Trummerkind (German for "children of the ruins"). I am particularly fond of art provocateurs; in particular, extremists like Chris Burden, Karen Finley and Bob Flanagan. But Trummerkind's stunt may be my all-time favorite.

Disgruntled by the fact that a 1.3 million-square-foot mall was being constructed in their neighborhood (its presence actually prompting the re-naming of their street from Kinsley Avenue to Providence Place), Townsend, Yoto and six fellow artists came up with a freakishly surreal plan: if the mall was going to move, uninvited, into their neighborhood - they would move, uninvited, into the mall.

It's the kind of thing stoners chuckle about as they pass the bong. But, for Townsend and company, the idea presented a very real opportunity to demonstrate their views on the thoughtless tide of consumerism washing over our culture: the selling of lifestyles and the bondage of accumulating the dream. Nobody could ever have imagined how well their plan would work.

Inspired, in part, by a radio ad that suggested it would be "great" to live at the mall (because of all the amenities available to shoppers), the collective began covertly hauling two tons of construction materials into a neglected storage area near a stairwell in the mall's garage. Eventually, they walled-off (with 90 30-pound cinderblocks) a 750-square-foot portion of the area to which they attached an innocuous steel security door and, upon completed construction of "the apartment," they began moving in.

According to an excellent story in The Providence Journal, the "relatively soundproof" apartment was outfitted with a "sectional sofa, a love seat, a coffee table, a breakfast table with four chairs, lamps, a throw rug, a hutch and paintings on the walls." Electricity (which powered the apartment's primary source of entertainment - a Sony Playstation2 videogame console) was obtained by running an extension cord to an exterior outlet and, while there was no running water in the space, the mall's bathrooms provided the necessary comforts.

Until their discovery, and Townsend's subsequent arrest in October of 2007, the collective lived, off and on, in the apartment for four years - spending month-long stretches in the space, documenting mall life, taking meetings, playing videogames and adding gradual improvements designed to make the apartment, in Townsend's words, "super sweet."

Eventually, Townsend's charge was reduced from "breaking and entering" to the lesser infraction of "trespassing." He was sentenced to six months' probation, ordered to pay court costs and barred, permanently, from the location -- a small price to pay for pulling off one of the most elaborate (and culturally relevant) gags in the history of performance art.

Visit the Trummerkind website to see fascinating stills from the project, including the hilarious "The One" splash page, featuring Yoto in a fake promotion for the apartment as a desirable piece of luxury real estate (a clever mimic of the pitches used to market the trendy, slap-'em-up lofts being propagated across the country). Also, check out this video of the apartment's halcyon days.

Viva La Revolucion!... and pass the Game Boy.

Wendy Case is the MOLI View's contributing editor for Arts & Entertainment.

New York Times media columnist David Carr documents chillingly in his addiction memoir The Night of the Gun. In fact, I usually stayed with a bassist who doubled as the scene's biggest drug dealer - let's call him Sven. But even we pale, tattooed potheads went for hikes around Minneapolis's many lakes and parks. Remember that scene in Purple Rain when Prince drives Apollonia out to a lake on his motorcycle? The call of nature is never far away in Minneapolis.

Perhaps all that clean air offers a stark contrast to the pockets of depravity and hard-luck characters. Two of the best records of the year so far come from Minneapolitans skilled at spinning tales of gritty realism out of a city not known for its grit. On the Atmosphere album When Life Gives You Lemons, You Paint That Shit Gold, rapper Slug writes about a waitress trying to pay off student loans, a lost-soul rock star, and on "Dreamer," a single mom struggling to make it from day to day. With a mantra chorus of "but she still dreams after she woke tight hold on that hope/ sometimes it can seem so cold do what you gotta do to cope," it's probably the best feminist anthem by a male rapper since Tupac's "Dear Mama." Spieled out over jazz piano riffs and spry, live backpacker hip-hop, these are unsentimental but sympathetic portraits worthy of Bruce Springsteen or Joe Strummer.

The Hold Steady's Craig Finn explicitly toasts Strummer on "Constructive Summer": "I think he might have been our only decent teacher." Finn cut his teeth in Minneapolis but formed the Hold Steady in Brooklyn. Whereas he used to locate many of his songs in the back woods and alleys of the Twin Cities, on Stay Positive, he writes about all of America. On first listen "Constructive Summer," with its backdrop of paper mills and parties, became my instant summer anthem - I was driving around the Upper Peninsula, after all, in a county where the red steel plant of a container company is the largest local employer. I interviewed Finn a couple years ago, and not surprisingly, he knew my old friend Sven. Sven could have been the model for many of Finn's characters: the big-hearted drunk, the tragedy looking for a savior.

Minneapolis is in the heartland, so maybe it's not so surprising that it's produced two of the aughties' Strummers - Woody Guthriesque champions of the downtrodden and unsung. Unlike the Minneapolis bands of the '80s, these bards aim for the anthems. Maybe grit is in the eye of the beholder.

Evelyn McDonnell is MOLI's editor at large. Her Populism blog runs Tuesdays and Thursdays.