October 18, 2010 – "I can change, I can change, I can change," James Murphy sang Friday night at the Hollywood Bowl, "if it helps you fall in love." No need, homie: You had us within the first few bars of "Dance Yrself Clean," the slow-boil shuffle with which Murphy and his bandmates in LCD Soundsystem opened Friday's killer 90-minute blowout. Headlining a hipster-friendly triple bill that also included Hot Chip and Sleigh Bells, LCD turned this upscale Los Angeles venue into a sweaty loft party with room for 18,000 or so shimmying Southern Californians. The only thing Murphy should adjust?

July 7, 2009 – This morning, a few hours before the start of the Michael Jackson memorial service, the Staples Center courtyard resembled a dense jungle of cables and microphones and satellite dishes, beefy camera guys shooting pictures of other beefy camera guys shooting pictures of other beefy camera guys. An alien landscape in which every human somehow seemed comfortably at home. The inside of Staples Center itself was built for incessant noise -- the loud whoops of Lakers fans, for instance, or the prepubescent shrieks of Hannah Montana's minions. Today, though, once you made it past the handful of security checks ringing the 20,000-capacity arena -- a ticket wouldn't do; you also needed a gold wristband -- the volume level inside Staples was shockingly low. Could you hear a pin drop? Probably not.

December 24, 2008 – Before she moved to Los Angeles to concentrate on her career as a musician, Anya Marina spent her days spinning other people's records -- lots of 'em -- at a series of San Diego radio stations. So it's probably safe to assume that she knows what she's talking about when she says she hates singer-songwriter music. "I'm just over it," she admits, sipping green tea at a sushi place near her home in L.A. "I mean, I wanna light the crowd's asses on fire. How can you do that when you're sitting on a stool strumming a guitar?" Marina is well acquainted with the challenge: In 2005 she put out a -- shudder -- singer-songwriter album called Miss Halfway; it didn't sell well, but it did attract the interest of music supervisor Alexandra Patsavas, who licensed the title track for Grey's Anatomy and signed Marina to her Atlantic affiliate, Chop Shop Records.

November 21, 2008 – The Ringers have played plenty of memorable shows since frontmanJoe Hursley, 29, and bassist Joe Stiteler, 29 -- community-college pals from Austin, Texas, who moved to Los Angeles to pursue acting -- formed the live-wire garage-punk outfit four years ago. There was that one time they inadvertently rocked a skinhead bar in Ventura, and another, equally frightening incident when guitarist Joe Robinson, 31, accidentally bashed Hursley in the noggin with his instrument."I could feel this liquid coming down my head," the singer remembers over margaritas at an L.A. Mexican joint. Adds Robinson, "You definitely would've died of blood loss if you'd kept going." The most unusual, though, was the night they played one song for six hours while filming a minute-long concert scene for the 2006 Justin Long comedy Accepted, in which Hursley portrayed a shell-shocked army vet.

May 30, 2008 – The Little Ones play a perky brand of blue-skies indie pop that sounds like a retrofitted blast from California's endless-summer past. Behind frontman Ed Reyes' friendly-dude demeanor, however, lurk the beginnings of a cranky old man. "I was totally anti-MySpace until the beginning of 2006," Reyes says, downing beers with his bassist brother Brian and guitarist Ian Moreno at a grungy dive down the street from his house in Los Angeles' musician-besotted Silver Lake neighborhood. Reyes blames the Luddite attitude on his former day job in a major-label A&R department, which entailed scanning countless "terrible-looking" MySpace profiles for acts to bring to his boss' attention. But a year into the Little Ones' existence, he caved and put up a bare-bones page. "No pictures, no music, nothing," he says.

May 28, 2008 – The Chapin Sisters recently released their debut album, but the three siblings -- all nieces of late singer/songwriter Harry Chapin (of "Cat's in the Cradle" fame) -- have been singing separately and together since they were kids: Jessica, 40, cut class to record commercial jingles, while Abigail, 28, and Lily, 26, pulled children's choir duty on records by the Olsen twins, among others. "I ran into Mary-Kate at a New Year's Eve party a few years ago," Abigail says, grabbing a bite with her sisters before a show at the Echo in Los Angeles.

May 15, 2008 – There's no doubting that plenty of the approximately 2,000 people who paid 200 bucks to see Metallica play a benefit concert at L.A.'s Wiltern Theatre last night took pride in the fact that their money was going to support a good cause -- namely, the Silverlake Conservatory of Music, a nonprofit music-education center founded in part by Flea of the Red Hot Chili Peppers. But judging by the line that stretched down Wilshire Boulevard more than two hours before showtime, you can also be sure that this crowd included hundreds of folks who'd just as happily have burned the cash if it earned them the chance to see Metallica rock a room one-tenth the size of the venues they normally play. The band certainly didn't adjust their volume for the more intimate environs, bulldozing through "Sad But True" and "Disposable Heroes" like dinosaurs on a warpath.

February 24, 2008 – When we went into the studio, we had nothing," says Greg Dulli, 42, the formerAfghan Whigs and current Twilight Singers frontman, from a corner booth at Footsie's,one of two Los Angeles bars he owns. Dulli is talking about Saturnalia, the haunting new goth-blues album he made with Mark Lanegan, 43, late of Screaming Trees, under the appropriately seedy nom de rock the Gutter Twins. And though he means that the two men hadn't written any songs before they started work on the record in 2003, they hardly went into the studio with nothing: Over the two decades since they were at the forefront of the tumultuous alt-rock feeding frenzy, the grunge-era survivors have traveled parallel paths through major-label near-stardom, postbreakup tussles with drug addiction, and subsequent reinvention as respected, battlescarred career artists.

January 30, 2008 – I'll agree with anybody that we've made the same record a couple of times," says Jack Johnson, whose latest, Sleep Through the Static, arrives this month. "But this time we wanted to take the road less traveled." Why? After recording the soundtrack to 2006's Curious George, Johnson, 32, realized that his signature style had become inextricably linked with a kids' cartoon -- a lucrative if somewhat stifling association. We caught up with the Oahu, Hawaii-based singer at the Los Angeles home that houses Brushfire, his record label, as well as a studio powered by solar panels. He served organic green tea. Yes, some stereotypes exist for a reason. Sleep Through the Static is a lot darker than your previous work. All my happy-go-lucky songs got used for Curious George, so I had to start fresh.

January 23, 2008 – As anyone who saw the dance sequences in Idlewild can attest, OutKast are no strangers to ass-shaking. Yet Antwan "Big Boi" Patton had little experience in the realm of tutus and pliés before the Atlanta Ballet approached him about collaborating on a new production. "I've dated a couple of ballerinas," he says. "But I was like, 'That sounds kind of dope -- let's crank it up.'" If Dirty South hip-hop and a 400-year-old European dance technique seem like an odd match, well, that's the point. "These are two art forms that are identified in our culture as so completely opposite," says choreographer Lauri Stallings.