A generation ago, the singer-songwriter Dave Alvin founded the rootsy-rock band The Blasters with his brother Phil in Los Angeles — and they made an indelible mark on the early 1980’s punk scene. But the life of a working musician, often playing to very small crowds, was trying ...

The band Of Montreal is known for its theatrical, over-the-top shows. Frontman Kevin Barnes’ antics and flamboyant costumes recall the heyday of glam rock. Barnes wasn’t a born performer — as a teenager, he was a loner, painfully shy. On a family camping trip, his uncle brought along a guitar ...

Bonus Track: Kevin Barnes covers the Rolling Stones’ “Under My Thumb”

The industrial designer Karim Rashid has 3,000 designs in production — including the Umbra “Oh Chair,” the Bobble Water Bottle, and the “Garbo” trash can — many featuring his signature rounded edges, cast in colorful plastics. Born in Egypt, Rashid found his calling as a designer early. ...

Growing up in Evanston, Illinois, Rashid Johnson remembers school trips to visit The Art Institute of Chicago. On one visit, while horsing around trying to impress a girl, Johnson bumped into a painting. The painting was a large, black monochrome by Clyfford Still, the most ...

Sergio Muñoz was only seven years old when he became a devotee of the band Kiss. He discovered the Alive! album in Tower Records and was mesmerized by the cover. Isolated and lonely, a recent immigrant from Mexico, Muñoz connected to the band’s fantasy life ...

Video: Kiss, “Watching You”

Young Jean Lee is a playwright who’s become an it-girl of experimental theater in New York City. But as a kid in the late 1980s, Lee was mainstream, dressing in Esprit and listening to New Kids on the Block. But a Rolling Stone review convinced her to splurge on Paul’s Boutique ...

Video: "Hey Ladies" by the Beastie Boys

In the 1980s, Marion Roach was a party girl and aspiring writer, clerking for The New York Times by day and hitting the clubs by night. She was in love with New York and felt she was living in the center of the universe. One day she was handed a copy of William Kennedy’s novel Legs ...

Daniel Eagan knew from a young age that he wanted to pursue a career in film. The movie he credits with setting him on that path, Preston Sturges’ Sullivan’s Travels  (1941), also gave him nightmares. The movie is about a disgruntled director named John Sullivan. Fed up ...

Video: A scene from Sullivan’s Travels

Gerald Joyce is a professor of biochemistry at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. In the 1970s, he was studying biochemistry at The University of Chicago, when he discovered Gravity's Rainbow, the sprawling World War II novel by Thomas Pynchon ...

The drummer Jack DeJohnette has recorded with all the jazz superheroes of the last half century. But he tells Studio 360 that what he really wanted to do was play piano. He’d begun a promising career as a pianist when he was entranced by the drummer Vernell Fournier, who had ...

Video: Vernell Fournier plays with brushes

When Amy Douglas was a teenager, her parents sent her to a boarding school for troubled kids deep in the Arizona desert. There she fell deep into a depression and struggled with an eating disorder. Then a cassette copy of The Name of This Band Is Talking Heads helped ...

Larry Rosenblum is a professor of psychology with a focus on perception — he’s written a book about the senses called See What I’m Saying. Rosenblum credits a musical revelation with leading him down that path. Growing up with 1970s prog-rock, he thought that virtuosity and spectacular showmanship were the hallmarks ...

“Larger-than-life” doesn’t do justice to performer Sandra Bernhard. She can be cartoonishly tough and irreverent, but also intensely sincere. Her breakout role came in Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy (1983), in which she plays an obsessed fan who helps kidnap the talk show host ...

Abigail Washburn thought she had her goals set. She was on her way to a career in international law based in China when a bluegrass musician stopped her in her tracks. At a party, she heard a recording of Doc Watson singing “Shady Grove” and she fell in love with the banjo. “I was struck by it as something ...

Bonus Track: “Burn Through” from City of Refuge

Neil Finn is the lead singer of Crowded House, a band which had its share of big hits in the 80s and 90s. (Admit it, you belted along to “Don't Dream It's Over.”) Growing up in New Zealand, Finn was raised on the Beatles and David Bowie: “I was playing piano and playing guitars and trying to emulate those guys,” he remembers ...

Brian Blade is a drummer's drummer. He's played with Chick Corea, Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Norah Jones, and Bob Dylan. He also leads his own ensemble, The Fellowship Band. Growing up in Shreveport, Louisiana, Blade was raised on gospel, soul, and funk. But when he when he was 16 ...

Bonus Track: “The Dawntreader”

In July we lost one of the great American painters — Cy Twombly, who was 83. Twombly defied categories. Unlike the abstract painters of the previous generation, like Jackson Pollock and Willem DeKooning, Twombly’s work was playful...

Bonus Track: Music Inspired by Twombly's Painting

When jazz saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa was still a student at Berklee College of Music, his older brother gave him an album called Saxophone Indian Style — as a joke. Mahanthappa had been suspicious of American jazz’s sampling of Indian...

Listener Susan Evans grew up in rural Louisiana during the 1950s and 60s. Her first year of high school was also the first year of federally enforced integration in her town — and that did not sit well with her white parents. It wasn’t until years later that ...

Industrial designer Karim Rashid creates ordinary household objects known the world over: he has more than 3000 in production, including the Umbra “Oh Chair” and the Bobble Water Bottle which filters water as you drink.  He found his calling early, when his family crossed ...