"I only do TV interviews nowadays," Ali Youngblood jokes backstage at Manchester University's Academy 3. A breathless monsoon of innuendo, wisecracks, and drawled chuckles, the 24-year-old keyboardist for one of the most talked-about bands of 2008 doesn't seem fazed by the attention.

My Bloody Valentine made a lot of noise in America in 1992. Figuratively -- their album Loveless had become a critical sensation -- and literally -- with a spring tour of the U.S. that's been rated as the second loudest in history.

On a Sunday in April 2006, Gary Harris pulled up to D'Angelo's large starter mansion outside Richmond, Virginia, in a limo. Harris, the A&R man who'd first signed D'Angelo in the early '90s and who had overseen his 1995 debut, Brown Sugar, was on a mission: to escort the singer to Eric Clapton's Crossroads Treatment Centre in Antigua.

Kamaal "Q-Tip" Fareed is the leader of Queens, New York–based group A Tribe Called Quest, whose innovative first three albums are perhaps hip-hop's most universally beloved -- by both fans and critics. Tensions plagued 1996's disappointing fourth, Beats, Rhymes and Life, and the trio split in 1998.

Since its release in the spring, Volume One, the first album from She & Him, has been something of an under-the-radar surprise. While some may have wanted to dismiss this folksy collaboration between indie troubadour M.

Montreal is only 47 minutes from New York in a plane no bigger than a school bus. But on this cloudy late April morning, each of those 47 minutes is teeth-gnashingly, stomach-churningly turbulent, making it impossible to forget that you are, in fact, not on a school bus, but rather inside a thin metal tube careening rapidly 35,000 feet above the ground in a manner antithetical to man's nature.