April 1, 2011 – John Darnielle, founder and sole constant of the Mountain Goats, has been one of rock's most prolific and devoutly worshipped songwriters for 20 years. "I used to assume no one would care," he says, "but I do think now I've written songs that are useful to people having dark hours." The hold steady may have sung the words "Me and my friends are like / The drums on 'Lust for Life,' " but John Darnielle lives them. As he speaks in his living room in Durham, North Carolina, it's easy to understand how he has ascended to cult-hero status as one of our greatest lyricists: He is as educated and evangelical about unexplored corners of art and culture as his fans are toward his own work.

January 4, 2005 – Marianne FaithfullBefore the PoisonAnti Nancy SinatraNancy SinatraAttack/Sanctuary Back when these OGs (Original Groupies) were the young, leggy goddesses at whose feet the Almost Famous "Band Aids" likely worshipped, a band more famous than all of them suggested that we get by with a little help from our friends. 'Twas ever thus for these two muses-slash-artists, known as much for who they knew as for who they were and what they sang. Of course, that ultimately didn't diminish their music, and now that they're old enough to have aesthetic protégés, the students are hooking up the teachers. When we last saw Faithfull, she was providing mightily unfortunate backing vocals to "The Memory Remains" from Metallica's Reload.

September 7, 2004 – The Dillinger Escape PlanMiss MachineRelapse A lot of River Styx water has gone under extreme metal'sbridge to Hell in the five years since the Dillinger Escape Planreleased its intricately raging classic Calculating Infinity. The bandfloored first-person-shooter types by taking math rock's jazzyriffology and dime-stopping time changes (somebody owes the DazzlingKillmen a gift basket) and stapling them to the hardcore they grew upon. Outsider metal had a boom just like everything else in the '90s,but Infinity still felt like a dizzying peak, a safe space to thrashfor kids too smart to feel welcome in mook-world and too young to buybeer. These days, it seems like metalcore has becomejust another subsidiary of Emo, Inc.-prog hobbits like Coheed andCambria and flailers like the Blood Brothers have opened for DashboardConfessional, for Satan's sake!

July 15, 2004 – WilcoA Ghost Is BornNonesuch Wilcoringleader Jeff Tweedy is famous for spinning rural Americana intodreamy art rock, and for turning record-label wrangling into criticalgold. And now, after packing himself off to rehab in March, he's alsofamous for getting hooked on pills. So maybe Wilco's fifth album, A Ghost Is Born,should be taken with a grain of salt and a couple of Vicodin. Becauseif you're stone sober, much of it sounds like the "difficult" Wilcoalbum that Warner Bros. warned you about. Not literally, of course. It was 2002's Yankee Hotel Foxtrotthat Warner/Reprise declined to release on aesthetic grounds. Whichseems insane in retrospect, because as "difficult" albums go, Yankee--eventuallyreleased, to rapturous acclaim, by Warner subsidiary Nonesuch--was apretty easy listen.

February 17, 2004 – Wherever leather-clad S&M fetishists ride the subway besidemulti-eyed aliens and wherever giant, angry chickens rise upagainst their human oppressors, odds are, Jimbo has been there. Formore than 25 years, the flat-topped everydude of underground comicshas roamed the hallucinogenic dreamscapes of artist Gary Panter,wearing little more than a loincloth and a perpetually blankexpression. "Incomics," says Panter, 53, from his messy studio in Brooklyn, "you'realways trying to take people somewhere and convince them they're therefor a moment." So far, it's a trip that's taken him and hissquare-jawed protagonist from the pages of the seminal Los Angeles punkzine Slash to the alternative comics anthology Raw toJimbo's own self-titled series, published by Matt Groening's ZongoComics. "When I started the Zongo series," says Panter, "the stripswere super simple.

December 31, 2003 – When Michael Chabon's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel ofsuperhero history and immigrant assimilation, The AmazingAdventures of Kavalier & Clay, was published in 2000,critics couldn't help but note that it would make a greatcomic book. Apparently, the author was paying attention to hisreviews. This month, Dark Horse Comics publishes the first issue ofMichael Chabon Presents...The Amazing Adventures of theEscapist, which brings to life Chabon's fascist-bashingcostumed champion in the medium for which he was made. "Iwanted to see if the Escapist could be a viable character outside ofthe protection of the novel," says Chabon, 40.