In colleges around the world, 1967 felt for the whole year like the first week of spring. Green with promise, the spirit of possibility was everywhere. In 1967 psychedelia blossomed and a new breed of rock bands aspired to art and poetry. One of them, formed in the United Kingdom by Manchester University students, adopted the trippy-sounding handle of Van der Graaf Generator...

For all the reverence it pays its elders, rock music remains a young person's genre, with its brightest talent often peaking early then floundering, struggling to live up to past heights. It's a harsh reality of which Steve Kilbey, the middle-aged frontman for the veteran band The Church, is all too aware. "If I was an artist, at age 54 you'd expect me to be right at the top of my game, painting passionately and with mastered...

The John Schneider Orchestra originated around the piano in the bandleader's Walker's Point flat. At first it was just a lark, with Schneider and his friend David Carroll entertaining guests at their weekly dinner party with songs from the 1930s and '40s, especially from the Harold Arlen songbook. One of the regular dinner guests, Larry Krueger, had just opened a new bar and restaurant, Café Mélange...

Every day, for 10 years, John Vanderslice has eaten the same breakfast: granola with rice milk. He drinks a cup of tea when he wakes up, and a second at 4 p.m. He is a creature of habit. There is only one time he forces himself outside of his comfort zone: when he plays music. "I'm a very routine person," he says. "For me, I need to get out of that. I like to keep myself on edge." Great albums don't come from a system, and excitement doesn't come from a routine. Good music, as it turns out...

Though Maynard James Keenan is best known as the raging frontman for the alternative metal band Tool, he’s also a professional winemaker who lives on an Arizona vineyard. He’s aware of the novelty. “In some ways, the low expectations work in my favor,” Keenan says.

Though he's better known as the Yeah Yeah Yeahs' guitarist, Nick Zinner is also a dedicated photographer who packs a camera on every tour. The photos he's compiled in the 2005 book I Hope You Are All Happy Now and in a New York exhibition last year could rival Almost Famous for its heavily romanticized view of the rock 'n' roll lifestyle. Glowing crowds gaze at the stage with adoration and anticipation. Zinner's photogenic friends pose playfully. The band parties backstage. The photos give...

In the six years since Third Eye Blind released their last album to commercial indifference, the stars have realigned for the once chart-topping alternative band. After a long period of dormancy, the band's late-'90s hits have found second life on nostalgic radio stations and in the songbooks of frat boys with acoustic guitars everywhere. Jim Carrey, another icon of Clinton-era irreverence, even prominently covered...

If Milwaukee ever launched a P.R. effort to lure more bands to the city, no band would make a better poster child for the campaign than Fever Marlene, the alt-rock duo that relocated to Milwaukee from Chicago in 2006. "It's just so affordable here," explains singer Scott Starr. "We found a real cheap studio loft here that we could build a studio in, and still afford to play Chicago, Minneapolis and Madison whenever we wanted, or to go out to Los Angeles or New York whenever we needed to...

It seemed like the perfect set list at the time. Since they were booked at a South by Southwest day party dominated by their peers from the turn of the century, including Frodus, a D.C. post-hardcore group that reunited this year after a decade hiatus, for old time's sake Cursive dedicated most of the set to their 2000 album Domestica, a crushing song cycle far removed from the band's current, less turbulent rock...

Prophetic didn't actually expect to hear back from Pharrell Williams after he ran into him at a N.E.R.D. concert last fall and attempted to pass on his new CD, but against the odds a month later Prophetic received a call from Pharrell's people and, soon after, Pharrell himself.

M. Ward is familiar. He may, in fact, be the familiar-ist musician of this century. His music is plucked from the furthest reaches of your long-term memory, from songs you can't quite remember, from bands whose names get lost on the tip of your tongue. He swivels from Johnny Cash to Chuck Berry to Roy Orbison, and channels Buddy Holly just as well in his own work as he does in a cover of Holly's "Rave On...

Maybe it was nature or maybe it was nurture. Either way, music must have been in the cards for Margaret Stutt, aka Pezzettino. However, a musical demi-career-to coin a term for the MP3-posting, DIY-releasing, club-touring route of 21st-century indie musicians-only recently entered her mind. A little more than a year ago she took up accordion and began writing songs. Since then, under the stage name of Pezzettino, she has played...

When told he's known better as a songwriter than a singer, Kris Kristofferson laughs. "I don't think there's much doubt about that," says Kristofferson, 72, in a familiar, graveled baritone thickened with age. Armed only with a guitar, a harmonica and his soul, Kristofferson has come to appreciate the directness of the acoustic approach and its ability to help him reach an audience. "All I can do is go by people's reactions to my work," Kristofferson says. "It's just the way I communicate with people."

"Oh, if only there were clothes on the floor," Gareth Campesinos! says midway through his band's hit (well, Internet hit), "You! Me! Dancing!" Ignore the cloyingly cute title; like the rest of Los Campesinos!' debut album, Hold On Now, Youngster…, the song isn't actually about dancing but rather the pursuit of sex that always seems just out of reach. Not since the Violent Femmes' 1982 debut has an album so...

On the phone Rachael Yamagata is chatty, almost dangerously so. She repeatedly gets so overexcited by whatever she's giggling about that she walks straight into people on the street. This time, she is talking about her love of the Style Network show "Clean House. I have these weird tendencies toward designing furniture and rearranging furniture, and cleaning. If you give me a vacuum, I'd clean you...

Like so many modern adult-contemporary artists, Missy Higgins owes much of her stateside success not to radio, but television. Her music has been featured on shows like "Grey's Anatomy," "The Hills," "Brothers and Sisters" and "One Tree Hill," and her latest single alone, "Where I Stood," has been featured on no less than seven programs...

In one incarnation or another, for the past 15 years, singer-songwriter Will Oldham has made records on his own terms. After a peripatetic period he returned to his native Louisville, Ky., making a conscious decision to live far from the major metropolitan centers so he could manage, by his own estimation, to make a decent living. Oldham's label, Chicago's Drag City, supports his decision to remain geographically and philosophically in the outlying areas, away from the business of music and closer to the art. Still, Oldham is ambivalent about his distance from the mainstream...

Kyle Denton tells me he is the manager and spokesman for Rocktopus, Milwaukee's eight-armed, aquatic rock 'n' roll machine. One can safely assume, though, that Denton and the mollusk are one and the same. Take the story of Rocktopus' first show. The band Elephant Walk, which features Denton, had to cancel a show, so Rocktopus quickly put together six songs in about a week and showed up as a replacement act. As a solo act, Rocktopus appeared to be a guy in a Hawaiian shirt with a plush octopus tied to his face...

DJs had been refining their craft since the earliest days of hip-hop, but it wasn't until the mid-'90s that they made the case that turntables could be considered a lead instrument. DJ Shadow's Endtroducing..... was the breakout hit of the era's turntablism movement, in part because it eschewed the showy scratching that battle DJs prided themselves on in favor of brainy compositions. The X-Ecutioners, however, proved...

When the Drive-By Truckers returned to touring last year, singer/guitarist Patterson Hood was eager to get back on the road. Just 18 months earlier, though, the feeling within the band from Athens, Ga., couldn't have been more different. "We were burned out and we were tired and we were kind of angry and frustrated," Hood says. "We had built this machine and all of a sudden we realized the machine was driving us. We weren't driving the machine anymore. And we started...

Lyle Lovett knows that great songwriting can be a means to an end, one that reaches out and touches audiences. The long, tall Texan, who's won several Grammy Awards for his heartfelt, wryly humorous lyrics, also knows a great song when he hears one. Based on his own musical experiences, the Houston-based singer/songwriter appreciates the art of songwriting more than most of us. "A great song is a rare thing," Lovett says. "Great songs never seem contrived; they just seem true." Lovett will explore many of his own songs during an all-acoustic evening Feb. 17 at the Pabst Theater, when he shares the stage...

If you make up a story about Leo Kottke, it's probably true. The 63-year-old roots singer/songwriter has lived a sweeping epic, a life incomparably colorful. As a boy, his family moved across 12 states. As a college dropout, he hitchhiked across the country. A firecracker damaged his hearing in one ear. Service in the Naval Reserve damaged his hearing in the other. He'll be glad to tell you about all of this, too. On stage, the acoustic guitarist will burst into four-minute monologues about how difficult it is to kill chickens, or about the dangers of stealing amplifiers. His shows are two-parts music and one-part backcountry Spalding...

Scott Weiland toured a lot in the last year-too much, by his own account. The singer started 2008 on the road with Velvet Revolver, his band with three Guns N' Roses vets. When that tour turned sour, ending with Weiland's acrimonious (and inevitable) departure from the group, he immediately rejoined his former Stone Temple Pilots band mates for a six-month reunion tour. "It was cool," Weiland says, "but we ended up touring longer than we should have. It was supposed to be four months, and the first four months were a lot of fun. But I think six months was a bit much when you're...

Dan DuChaine, veteran drummer of the Speedfreaks, has seen it all. Along with vocalist Stephan Tremblay and guitarist Carl Steinhagen, he crashed through the hardcore and punk scenes in the early '80s when shows were "brutal," and not just in terms of sound. These days, "if you see a kid getting beat up in the front line, you stop the show-that's etiquette," DuChaine says. "But violence was a big problem back then." The punk scene itself may be more forgiving, but the Speedfreaks' music remains largely unchanged, filled with raw, positive energy. A quarter...

Chris Vos admits the timing of his epiphany wasn't ideal. Vos' band, Freshwater Collins, had just spent the last year and a half writing and prepping their new album, saving up the cash to record it at Madison's Smart Studios with producer Beau Sorenson, who has worked on recent albums by Death Cab for Cutie, and to perfect its artwork and packaging. With just two weeks until the album was to go to press, the band was driving home from a show opening for the Secret Machines when Vos shared his revelation with his band mates: "Guys, we're changing the name of the band...