It doesn't sound very cool, but D.A. Wallach and Maxwell Drummey, the Harvard alums who make up harmony-loving pop duo Chester French, owe their success to solid study habits. "We got deep into the canon of classic rock in the summer between our freshman and sophomore years," says Wallach, 22, whose ghostly pallor, goofy grin, and scarlet hair make him resemble a modern-day Archie.

Bobby Ray Simmons was an early bloomer. At an age when most kids are still mastering the finer points of tag, the man who would later be known as B.O.B. was mapping his future.

Even an ethnomusicologist in a hallucinogenic state couldn't invent a band like Dengue Fever. This Los Angeles–based sextet modernizes Cambodian psychedelic guitar pop from the '60s -- which was originally influenced by the rock and soul records broadcast over U.S. Armed Forces radio from Vietnam. Got that?

Arriving just 15 minutes before stepping onstage at Philadelphia's tattered Khyber club, Athens, Georgia-based rockers the Whigs find that their reputation has preceded them. "You guys are screamers, right?" asks the club's soundman, fiddling with singer/guitarist Parker Gispert's mic.

It takes a peculiar person to enjoy being interrogated by U.S. immigration agents. Someone, in fact, like Jens Lekman. "I said I was a musician, then one agent told the other one, 'Check him out on Wikipedia,'" the 26-year-old Swede recounts gleefully at a Manhattan café. "So they started reading about me, and they got really into it.

Many claims to Robyn's greatness are made in "Curriculum Vitae," the spoken-word intro to her new album: "World-record holder with a high score of two gazillion in Tetris…she split the atom, invented the X-ray… choreographed the fights for Bruce Lee in Enter the Dragon…" But the most improbable boast of all?