August 1, 2012 – Olivia Trevor Control member and co-founder of the Elephant 6 collective Bill Doss passed away suddenly on Monday at the age of 43. He had a long and storied career as a indie-rock songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, audio engineer, scene lynchpin, and sound artist. But before all that, growing up outside Ruston, Louisiana, his idea of music itself was literally synonymous with the Beatles. He once recalled to the San Francisco Weekly about hearing the Fab Four at age 10, thinking, "Wow, this is neat. This music thing is good." As Doss grew and evolved, the Beatles remained his lingua franca as he and his high school pals discovered punk rock, screamed into boomboxes and four-tracks, got jobs at the college radio station, invented the Elephant 6 Recording Company, and eventually formed real bands.

April 20, 2012 – "It's our favorite holiday," Yo La Tengo's Ira Kaplan declared from the Le Poisson Rouge stage, "Lambchop Comes to New York Day." It was a quiet celebration, but a celebration nonetheless.

November 16, 2011 – Alternative godfathers and four-time SPIN cover stars R.E.M. ended a 30-year career of defining generations and defying MTV with no fanfare beyond an website announcement. The band's Mike Mills told SPIN last week, "There was no moment of clarity," as he kicked his feet up on the Warner Brothers furniture, explaining that the split was a slow-burner that had been in the works since 2008. Thankfully, Warner Bros. is issuing a proper eulogy in the form of a career-spanning greatest hits set. The two-disc retrospective Part Lies, Part Heart, Part Truth, Part Garbage is their first to include tracks from both their pioneering I.R.S. days and their 10 records for Warner Bros. — not to mention three new tracks.

November 10, 2011 – "There was no moment of clarity," R.E.M.'s Mike Mills tells SPIN on his second-to-last day as a Warner Brothers employee, feet up on the furniture, chatting about the band's two-disc retrospective Part Lies, Part Heart, Part Truth, Part Garbage (due November 15). "We were discussing it on tour in 2008 and gradually the three of us came separately to the decision that breaking up might be the right thing to do at the time. We had an opportunity to do something that nobody else has really done — a band that has been together for a long time without any sort of bad things prompting the breakup.