It happens all the time: A pop musician wins over legions of listeners in Europe but fails to resonate with many Americans, who tend to treat non-English lyrics like Brie: interesting but not for frequent consumption. The music might be catchy, but unless it’s "La Bamba" or the Beatles breaking into French in "Michelle," we’re not collectively interested.

In the case of singer/songwriter Manu Chao, few listeners anywhere would be able to grasp all his lyrics, since he sings in six languages on his new album, Proxima Estacion: Esperanza ("Next Stop: Hope"). Chao’s music is just as hard to pin down, incorporating Caribbean, Latin, French, pop, rock, hip-hop, and Arabic flourishes, along with a cacophony of idiosyncratic samples and sounds—from revolutionary speeches to cartoonish cackling. Impish and vibrant, it’s the sound of cultures colliding at a wild party.

Chao’s global aesthetic isn’t a forced exercise in multiculturalism but rather a natural expression of his roving soul. Born in France to Spanish leftists who had fled Franco’s rule, Chao, 40, first achieved fame as lead singer and chief songwriter for Mano Negra, a feisty, punk-charged "combo-gang" that laid the groundwork for today’s fertile rock en español scene while selling 3 million albums and touring internationally in the late ’80s and early ’90s.

Not content with helping spawn a genre, Chao went solo and indulged his vagabond ways, traveling extensively in Africa and South America. Streetwise and populist, he began playing free, spontaneous shows before his official gigs, and he once bought an old train for a tour of the violence-wracked Colombian countryside. Musicians, magicians, and even trapeze artists ended up joining the rolling party, turning it into a punk South American version of the Merry Pranksters.

Chao’s fun-loving ways and sometimes silly lyrics can’t obscure his strong political bent. He has sung about the "disappeared" of Chile ("Desaparecido"), oppressed African immigrants in Spain ("Clandestino"), and the plight of "poor Algeria" ("Denia"). Beneath his laughter lurks a nagging melancholy about the state of the world. "The more I travel, the sadder I get," he told an interviewer, citing the growing poverty and desperation he sees.