When he’s not playing sold-out shows on both sides of the pond, Patrick Wolf hangs his hat in London’s West End. Here, the avant-garde musician shows us where he lands when he’s feeling bookish, thirsty and, yes, hungry.

With just over 48 hours to go, all our favorite leading ladies are frenetically booking last-minute lipos, emergency colonics, and marathon pilates classes -- while simultaneously managing miracle master cleanses. All of this in order to assure that they're able to squeeze into constrictive gowns while showing off a demure gait on the red carpet when Sunday rolls around. And while this year's best ladies (and their supporting counterparts) effortlessly snag one headline after another, even past grande dames of Oscar prominence are enjoying an uptick of increased notoriety. Sure, we won't care about more than three percent of all the winners come Monday morning (or today if you're betting by this leaked list of winners), but we can revel in everyone's temporary relevance anyway.

"It's just been one of those Patrick Wolf kind of days where I’ve got six things to do at once," says the 25-year-old musician, as he breaks from moving into his new house in London's South Bank, which happens to be just down the road from his old house. "But I enjoy every one of them very much." Today's trek couldn't be more different from the journey that Wolf has embarked upon since releasing his third studio album, The Magic Position, in early 2007. For the past two years, while navigating the loneliness of heartbreak and the empty hedonism of recovery, Wolf has been at work on Battle, a two-disc album split by tenor: the first half, Bachelor, emanates from a place of anguish, loss and vice—it's the Dorian Gray of the two. The Conqueror, which came into existence after Wolf fell in love with his current partner, introduces the world to a new, hopeful young man. He's evolved into quite the entrepreneur, as well. With Bandstocks, fans can buy shares in the stock of the album, fueling its production through investment, and allowing Wolf to retain creative control over the final cut. Below, the animated lycanthrope discusses the music, the madness and the hunger that brought him back from bachelor purgatory.

Recent BlackBook cover girl Tilda Swinton is far too mythical and mystical to do something so transparent as record her own album (yeah, that's right ScarJo, we see right through you). She's always been more of a recite-spoken-word-on-a-similarly-androgynous-indie-folk-crooner's-new-album type of gal. So in keeping with perceptions, Swinton will be guesting on Battle, the forthcoming album from newly christened Madonna hater Patrick Wolf.

The last place you'd expect a gang of boulder-sized bouncers to beat up on a fairly popular indie darling noted for his flamboyance is on the stands of a Madonna gig. The fact that Patrick Wolf and his boyfriend endured traumatic assaults at one of her Madgesty's "Sticky & Sweet" shows from last fall is a horror that seems to upend the only logic that's fueled her mojo in the pop pantheon. But in defense of the bouncers, they weren't provoked. Squeamish conservative concertgoers (had they gotten lost on their way to a Nickelback show?) had complained that Wolf's insistent liplocking with his boyfriend was unnerving them.