Never get high on your own supply. Last July, haze-rock conjurer Kurt Vile learned that lesson the hard way. "I was fired for having a beer on the job," says the 29-year-old former forklift operator at the Philadelphia Brewing Co. "Well, that's not the only reason, but my boss was a hard-ass. It turned out for the best, though.

Despite releasing their first single, "Too Young to Love," just a year ago, British noise-pop duo the Big Pink already boast a career's worth of triumphs: winning NME's Philip Hall Radar Award for emerging talent, touring with TV on the Radio, and, best of all -- per multi-instrumentalist Milo Cordell -- sharing quality time naked, bound, and abused.

Joel Stoker, cheeky frontman for the Rifles, doesn't mind if Britpop fans are confused by his band's new album. "It's okay if people buy it accidentally," muses the singer about The Great Escape, which bears the same title as his countrymen Blur's landmark 1995 effort. "In fact, that's a good strategy: to call your album after another massive album.

A young Jay-Z came up with rhymes in his head in order to impress his friend, the Notorious B.I.G. Atlanta's Playboy Tre learned to do the same thing for a less playful reason: He didn't want to get fired.

Two years ago, something finally went right for the Heavy. After almost a decade of inexplicable U.K. indifference to their swaggering garage rock and sweaty R&B, the then-intermittently gigging quartet found an appreciative audience -- 5,000 miles from their tiny hometown of Noid, England -- when the band was invited to Austin, Texas, for the South by Southwest festival.

Drinking on the patio of a Toronto bar, the Rural Alberta Advantage sit underneath a mural touting Big Rock Beer: "Alberta's Other Natural Resource." The irony of the ad is not lost on drummer Paul Banwatt, 28, multi-instrumentalist Amy Cole, 30, and singer-guitarist Nils Edenloff, 30.