Can a song that's about the fragility of life and the struggle to survive make you want to bounce around merrily? Somehow the Spinto Band's new song, "The Living Things," does just that. The song's lyrics that on their own could seem depressing — "true to life and in the flesh / though hanging on by just a thread" for example — are pushed aside by the jangly afrobeat-like melody. It's a song that, even though lead singer Nick Krill's voice wails about how he'll "be no good," leaves you with your toes tapping and a smile on your face.

The band's video for "The Living Things" also mixes this darker edge with a cheery outside. The video can be divided into two parts. The first segment follows a series of cute blob critters as they bend, twist, break apart, devour each other and explode. The drawn animation feels raw and reminds me of a few classic Sesame Street segments or a sunnier Don Hertzfeldt. The work is fluid and impressively keeps up with the jumpy instrumental bridges. My favorite part of the entire thing happens near the 1:50 mark into the video, when the band kicks up and an assortment of fantastic creatures quickly pop up on the screen and then vanish as fast as they came. It makes me want to go through frame by frame to see exactly what is drawn when.

"The Living Things" then switches its style but not its tone in the second part of the video — transforming to stop motion animation of the band wriggling and floating around an abandoned rooftop. While the people lack the impossible flexibility of the goo monsters, their herky-jerky style (very much like a flip-book) has an endearing charm.

Spinto Band singer Nick Krill told us he was surprised to see how similar director Phil Davis' take on the song was to his imagined music video:

It is strange, when I listen to this song I imagine people dancing under a big tent made of colored lights ... and when the song gets more rambunctious I picture them running at each other, jumping in to the air, locking arms (like in a square dance) and spinning around in mid-air until they kind of meld into each other. kind of strange, but there you go ... anyhow, I was excited to see that the director, Phil Davis, independently came up with a sort of similar idea and brought it to life ... but instead of people they are little amoeba things.

In an email, Davis described how he created "The Living Things'" animations:

"The Living Things" is a combination of hand drawn animation and pixilation (stop motion animation of humans). All of the roughly 2,000 drawings in the animation were created frame-by-frame by me over the course of 20 months. The animation frames were timed and synchronized to the music using an x-sheet, a method that dates back to the earliest sound cartoons created by the Walt Disney studios. The pixilation animation was greatly influenced by the work of Canadian animator Norman McLaren.

The Spinto Band's new album, Shy Pursuit, is out now.

I haven't kept an official ticker, but if government agents kicked in my door and forced me to pick the one album I've listened to more than any other, I'd have to say Neil Young's Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere. It came out 43 years ago this week.

I'm assuming people still bond and develop lifelong friendships over a shared love for a given album, but Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere is also the last record I can recall playing such a vital role for me. I'd only just met the person who introduced me to it years ago and we went on to become close friends, in no small part by spending hours and hours playing extended versions of "Down By The River" on our acoustic guitars. Even now, months can go by without seeing each other, but when we get together, we can pull out the guitars and play seemingly endless versions of the song, much to our wives' glee!

So happy birthday, Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere! Thanks for the memories, and massive thanks to the dear friend who first gave it to me.

Take a humongous group of excitable jokers who have too much free time on their hands, mix in enough instruments to satisfy an entire marching band variety, toss a few gigantic pom poms and enormously-loud/elaborate outfits their way and you'll get Mucca Pazza. The Chicago-based band is a 30-piece (yes, 30 trombonists, trumpeters, guitarists, cheerleaders, and more) community of "circus punks" that makes music that sounds like the results of a rowdy weekend at band camp.

Mucca Pazza's new song, "Boss Taurus," feels like a musical debate: the trumpets make a declaration; there's a response from the guitars; and the lone tuba tries to get a word in edgewise. The pieces constantly break apart and then get back to working together to get you bouncing in your chair.

The video for "Boss Taurus" has a remarkably simple concept — the members of the band perform and goof off on a tiny stage for three minutes. Its simplicity makes it easy to be swept up in the wave of exuberance and flashy colors packed into those minutes. In that short time, we can easily recognize the personalities of the performers — the single slightly-harried tuba player compared to the funky sax machines compared to the cocky guitar gods. I could easily see this video as an excerpt of a much longer film where the band has to put on a show to save their community rec center from an evil oil baron. Everyone's slightly awkward, a bit askew and having the time of their lives on the stage.

Director Jim Newberry described to us in an email how he wanted to focus on all the boisterous personalities in the band:

For this video I wanted to keep things simple. The musicians of Mucca Pazza are incredibly vibrant, energetic, and anarchic, and I didn't want to get in their way by using a lot of self-conscious film-making tricks. So we decided on a simple but lovely set with one camera locked down in a wide shot with occasional roving close-ups. I had worked with the band before and seen them perform many times, so I knew I could pretty much let them do their expressive, hilarious, inspiring performance the way they wanted to and it would be fabulous.

One of the things I love about the band is how there are so many of them — over 30 — yet each band member has his or her own distinctive personality; each wearing their own non-uniform uniform. They're definitely a cohesive unit, but each individual's personality shines through. That's what gave me the idea of having shots of them one at a time, either running or walking through the frame, or just standing there.

Mucca Pazza members Meghan Strell and Sharon Lanza talked about planning and designing the video with Newberry:

Our dear friend Jim shot black and white portraits of everyone in the band a few years ago. When we asked him to shoot a video, he proposed making a video portrait. We started out talking about individual portraits and developed the idea to capture the interaction of each section of the band, or section portraits. We shot the whole song all the way through a couple times with each of the seven sections, to provide Jim with a lot of material to sort through in his editing process. We wanted to capture and contrast individual interaction on the section level, and convey the personality of the trombone section vs. the drum section, for example.

We intentionally made the set too small for the whole band, riffing off our experience at many rock clubs where our 30 piece band performs on a 12'x15' stage ... or less. Jim wanted the set to be "beautiful" in a way and inappropriate for a marching band. The quick turn around and collaborative nature of the process are representative of the Chicago arts community that Mucca Pazza is so lucky to be a part of. Chicago is a city of generous and multi-talented artists that get things done.

The band's new album, Safety Fifth, will be out June 12, 2012.

Note: This is a recurring series in which we ask our unimaginably young interns to review classic albums they've never heard before. Until very recently, Jenna Strucko was an intern for NPR Music.

My musical relationship with Simon & Garfunkel began with an influence that any self-respecting, music-loving twenty-something would now be ashamed to admit: The Garden State soundtrack. From there, my knowledge of Simon & Garfunkel continued to be informed solely by incomplete pop culture encounters with the duo. Even though I've heard "Mrs. Robinson," I've never seen The Graduate in its entirety. "America" breezed right by me in Almost Famous, and I never quite understood why the song surrounding a particularly poignant scene in 500 Days Of Summer was called "Bookends."

But now, my narrow cinematic context of Simon & Garfunkel has been broadened. Listening to Bookends was like reuniting with an old friend I didn't know that I had: only after hearing the album start to finish did I recognize that these songs have been around me all along.

Simon & Garfunkel hit on so many elements of music that I am naturally drawn to — simple instrumentation, thought-provoking lyrics with narrative leanings and arrangements that allow both to shine.

 

But it's the story threaded throughout Bookends that riveted me. The first half of the album is practically a film in and of itself. My high levels of sentimentality might be to blame, but upon first listen, the lyrics hit me square between the eyes: the theme of a life of uncertainty culminating (but not necessarily becoming resolved) in old age was an emotionally packed one, even for this overly-optimistic twenty-year-old. By the time the duo transitioned into "Bookends," I felt like I could just cry my eyes out — and not because Summer and Tom were about to break up.

And that's what I've come to discover that I love about Simon & Garfunkel — they are absolute masters of emotive, transformative lyricism. In fact, it kind of scared me how much of an impact the first seven tracks of Bookends had on my psyche. If I had been listening to it on vinyl, I don't think I would have been able to muster the wherewithal to cross the room and flip over the record. But luckily, the album kept rolling and the upbeat tone of "Fakin' It" and silly lightheartedness of "Punky's Dilemma" almost immediately lifted my spirits. Whether I was dancing along or on the brink of tears, I loved the fact that Bookends engaged me emotionally from start to finish.

By the end of the album, the feeling that this record and I were old friends was only intensified, and with further listens I realized that I had an even deeper connection to the album than I wanted to admit. The music took on its own identity in my eyes, and the album itself became personified — it was almost like the record and I had been through some tough times together and that we'd come out stronger on the other side. I guess I have the films of my teenage years to thank for my initial connection to Simon & Garfunkel, but I'm overjoyed to have found a true friend in Bookends.

Now... who wants to watch The Graduate?!?

You've never heard "She'll Be Coming Round the Mountain" quite like this. For their first album together in nine years, Neil Young and Crazy Horse have taken classic American folk music and reinvigorated these songs with muscle, radiance and a whole lot of electric guitar. Some songs from the 19th century include "Oh Susanna" (no banjo here) and "Tom Dula" (you may know it better as "Tom Dooley"). Then there are songs from the last century that include Woody Guthrie's "This Land Is Your Land," complete with the original "deleted verses." Other surprises on the record, beyond the fiery versions of these songs, include a version of the 1957 doo-wop song by The Silhouettes, "Get a Job."

The album, Americana, comes out June 5, with performances by Young, Billy Talbot, Ralph Molina and Poncho Sampedro. We'll premiere this song today; you probably know it as "She'll Be Coming Round the Mountain," but here it's titled "Jesus' Chariot." This song, as with all the songs on the record, have been paired up with archival footage. This footage is from an early scene in D.W. Griffith's controversial 1915 film Birth of a Nation, in which the Southern Cameron family hosts a farewell ball for soldiers fighting for the Confederacy.

As for the song itself, Neil Young writes in the liner notes to Americana:

Written in the 1800s based on an old Negro spiritual, this song refers to the second coming of Jesus, and "she" is the chariot Jesus is coming on. Some interpret this as the end of the world. Others have said that "she" refers to union organizer Mary Harris "Mother" Jones going to promote formation of labor unions in the Appalachian coal-mining camps. The Americana arrangement continues the folk process with a new melody, a new title and a combination of lyric sources.

On Wednesday night in New York, I saw The Beach Boys play a concert. Now, if someone back in 1962 told you that the band would be still making music in 2012, you'd think them crazy. But I'm here now to tell you that you'll be able to see The Beach Boys perform in 2062.

At the Beacon Theater, as part of the group's 50th-anniversary tour, I expected a decent show. What I got was fabulous: Nobody owns harmonies in rock music like The Beach Boys. Not The Beatles, not Crosby Stills and Nash, not Fleet Foxes. Nobody. All these years later, they're doing it without brother Dennis or brother Carl.

Their secret weapon — actually, their two secret weapons, are those arrangements of Brian Wilson and the decision to allow others to enrich and carry on the tradition. On stage for this 50th-anniversary tour are all the surviving members of The Beach Boys, along with 10 more musicians referred to as The Beach Boys Band, a group of dedicated followers and students of five-part harmony, surf guitar, rocking sax and good-time fun. From Jeffrey Foskett (covering Carl Wilson's falsettos and sometimes shadowing Brian Wilson's excursions) to Darian Sahanaja, who listened to the band as a child in Indonesia and later came to California and pieced together the fragments of the legendary Smile album into a cohesive touring work, these additional musicians are, in a sense, folklorists. It's with their tender care that I can imagine The Beach Boys performing in 2062.

Now, many would say that the essence of that band is the brothers — of course Brian, as the sole surviving brother, is the last of that thread. If founding members Mike Love or Al Jardine survive beyond Brian, they can call themselves The Beach Boys, but without the Wilsons, many wouldn't think of them that way. But there's something other than the individual performers that makes The Beach Boys into The Beach Boys — and while no one may ever write songs like Brian did, I'd ask you to imagine a group, on stage in 50 years, that includes no original members but can rightfully call itself The Beach Boys.

Here's why (stick with me): Our mind plays tricks on us when it comes to listening to music. For example, I was listening to the new TED Radio Hour, and the psychologist Paul Bloom came on to talk about an experiment The Washington Post did with the world-famous classical violinist Joshua Bell. They put him in a subway station in street clothes and had him play. And despite his brilliant performance, few stopped to listen. The question Bloom asked was this: "How much would people like Joshua Bell, the music of Joshua Bell, if they didn't know they were listening to Joshua Bell?"

And the answer is ... not so much. According to Bloom, "Apparently, to really enjoy the music of Joshua Bell, you have to know you're listening to Joshua Bell." I'm coming back to The Beach Boys in a second, but this all has to do with something called "essentialism," an idea that for humans, there is something to liking something beyond its physical property. History and back story are crucial to enjoyment. Bloom also uses this example to explain our preferences: Let's say I put identical glasses of wine in front of you and told you one was from Trader Joe's and one was from a collector's wine cellar. Odds are you'll like the one from the collector's cellar more. We like history. This has been shown to be true time and time again.

I come up against this notion on All Songs Considered a lot. It's why I try to listen to much of my music without knowing what I'm listening to. I want to react directly to the music and not its history, because it's so hard to separate the two once you know the story.

Finally, back to my theory: The Beach Boys in 2062. This music will be loved in 50 years because it will still have a connection to its origins. It will be tended to and cared for by lovers of the form, and we as an audience will continue to love the music, because we'll see the story passed down from one generation to another. These Beach Boys will have the essence of the real thing. And that's the essentialism so vital to our love of music, like the wine. As Bloom explains, "If you believe you're drinking expensive stuff, parts of the brain associated with pleasure and reward light up like a Christmas tree," he says. "You really experience it in a different way."

With The Beach Boys, we're witnessing that tradition being passed down, and it's that provenance that will keep this music vital and alive. For all those 2062 audiences who long only to hear those original harmonies, there will always be the records. But I'm telling you, after hearing these boys sing in 2012, even having lost so much of who they were, they sounded better than ever.

Justin Jones is a local D.C. talent. I've seen him a number of times often as an opening act. I've enjoyed his music but it wasn't until this new record that I went "WOW!" Jones has just finished a powerfully magnificent Americana album called Fading Light. This song, "Miracles" opens with over a minute of hypnotic rock that — if it wasn't played so well and recorded so well — would fit comfortably on a Velvet Underground record. But the rest of the song is good strong radio-friendly rock 'n' roll and I'm curious to see a D.C. native make it to airwaves.

The video for "Miracles" is one part handmade science fiction and one part familial drama. A shady-looking scientist sells supposed miracles on TV. A family clashes over whether they should turn to this less-than-credible fellow to try to help their daughter (his miracle device looks like it's 95 percent wires, so the husband has a right to be skeptical). What seems to be shameless hucksterism turns out to be the real deal and video ends with a moment of quiet calm. After all the bouncing around and the fun, the quick transition to stillness brings out the aftereffect of the miracle and makes it resonate emotionally.

In an email, Jones described his thoughts on writing "Miracles":

"Miracles" was written about that feeling I get when I think about how vast the universe is and how crushing that can feel. We're all running around thinking we have "important" things to do and we're just these tiny creatures on this tiny rock. And we're destroying that rock, and we don't really seem to care.

The video's concept was thought up by director George Burroughs and producer Matt Chenet. Basically I'm selling snake oil, want some?

Chenet wrote in about trying to connect the visuals to the feeling of "Miracles":

We've been fans of Justin's music since we were first introduced a few years back, and we've worked together on a handful of projects since. For the "Miracles" video, we wanted to produce something that complemented the high energy and production value of the song, but also captured the conflicting emotion of the lyric. Much of Justin's music seems to walk the line somewhere between heartache and despair on the one end, and hope and resolution on the other. We felt it was important for the video to reflect that conflict, both in the overall aesthetic and the story itself.

Justin responded to the 'Salesman' idea early on, and from that point, George came up with the story of our conflicted family in search of a Miracle. After reading the treatment, Justin suggested asking his friends, the Hobens, to play our family, and fortunately for us — they agreed. We were all surprised with how naturally Justin, Kylie and Ruby Hoben took to their roles and played them with the understated style of experienced actors. Once we walked through the first few shots on set with our full cast — we knew we had something cool.

We built our sets in an empty row house rented by the 930 club, so that we could create the feel we wanted from the ground up and control every aspect of the shoot.

Justin Jones' new album, Fading Light, is out now.

Not every title fits its song, but 'Painting On A Canvas,' the fourth track from the Iranian-Canadian producer Amirali's debut LP, which comes out next week, makes it easy to imagine brushstrokes landing on a blank page.

If you'll forgive the mixed metaphor, this painting unfolds in three acts. The first has the artist teasing out his palette: a bluish chord of keys here, metallic strikes trailing off to black there, bright daubs of guitar, and an accelerating dribble of wood-block clicks. In an e-mail Amirali explained the song's concept.

"When I came up with the base of this song, my imagination was suddenly splashed with different colors and images. I could feel that I was throwing colors with different brushes on an enormous canvas."

What begins as swirling abstraction, with each stroke placed loosely on the tail of its predecessor, solidifies around a hip-hop beat at 1:46, introducing the second act. The sound of a nylon-stringed guitar carries the song's honeyed melody, and the song's parts — the piano, wood block, metallic percussion and the like — are given a new context. With a beat to anchor the ear, these loosely correlated sounds now cohere.

Amirali says the song draws heavily from his Iranian heritage. Towards the end of the song, that influence becomes clear.

"I have used an Iranian wind instrument, 'Ney,' which can be heard in traditional Iranian music. Towards the end of the track you get to hear the breath-taking voice of an Iranian man singing in his regional dialect, which is manipulated by weird and spacey effects."

That singing marks act two's shift into darker territory. The ominous bassline figures more prominently into the mix, that voice reverberates coldly against the canvas, and suddenly the beat gives way to a braying reed sound. The last act mirrors the first: Vivid strokes, cast liberally, yet purposefully.

I remember so clearly when Paul Simon headed to South Africa. His trip there was controversial in the midst of growing boycotts surrounding apartheid. I imagined with odd certainty that somehow Paul Simon would be killed. I spent the better part of a weekend listening to his music, sad and scared. Fortunately, nothing happened — only my love for his music became stronger.

Simon's journey was, incidentally, born of a desire to rekindle a fading career, but he returned with music that we'd be singing all these years later ... Graceland.

It's hard to believe it's been 25 years since Graceland's release. To celebrate, Simon is releasing a reissue of the album and a new documentary. Under African Skies follows Simon on a trip to South Africa earlier last year to discuss Graceland's legacy and the controversy surrounding the album's creation. Directed by Oscar-nominated documentarian Joe Berlinger, the documentary features interviews of musicians like Quincy Jones, Paul McCartney, and David Byrne. In this exclusive clip from the documentary, Harry Belafonte and guitarist John Selolwane discuss traveling around the world on the 1987 Graceland tour. There's also footage from the tour, where you will probably wince at the horribly-outdated fashion choices you can see in the audience.

The 25th anniversary edition of Graceland will be released June 5th.

Dr. John's latest album, Locked Down, was produced by Dan Auerbach, the guitarist and singer for The Black Keys. As Auerbach told NPR earlier this year, he wanted to coax something autobiographical from the revered New Orleans singer, who has built his career on inhabiting a very specific persona.

"I wanted to surround him with younger guys. To test him a bit," Auerbach said. "I also wanted him to talk from the Mac Rebennack perspective, lyrically. I didn't want him to talk from the Dr. John perspective."

Now, we have the one-and-only music video from the album, a behind-the-scenes look at how Rebennack becomes Dr. John over three and a half minutes of horn-laden rock that are simultaneously relaxed and tightly wound.

Directed by Reid Long, the video for "Revolution" was shot over three nights in April during a residency at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. It features footage of Rebennack and his band, including Auerbach, rehearsing onstage in an empty theater at BAM and hanging out backstage, before an audience begins to fill the auditorium's seats. Then, about halfway through the song, the music drops out as Dr. John, decked out in a blue suit, feathered straw hat, gator-tooth necklace and a long braid, steps into the spotlight and growls, "Let's all just pray on it right now."

The video is the result of a collaboration that began on a different stage, at last year's Bonnaroo. Auerbach invited Dr. John to participate in a jam at the festival, then went into the studio to record Locked Down in Nashville over the fall.

"We cut some tracks, then I whipped up the words, and that's how we got started recording the song," Dr. John wrote in an email. "Dan brought in The McCrary Sisters to do backup and made some shifts to make it work with them. When we got back together in Brooklyn last month for BAM, it all fell right back into place."

Royal Thunder is at a crucial point in its young career. The Atlanta hard-rock band's 2009 EP was like the hard-hitting rookie batter who causes serious chatter; a heavy, '70s-style riff machine with pipes that could tear through walls. But fast-burning flames burn the fastest, setting up crazy expectations and jinxing long-term prospects. To extend the baseball metaphor (sorry, I'm in full-on baseball mode right now), the members of Royal Thunder must have trained in the off-season for their new album CVI, developing songs beyond a killer riff and even adding a second guitarist to its roster. CVI not only builds on the promise of a great EP, but it's also a portrait of songs that have been painstakingly lived-in, like the deeply personal "Parsonz Curse."

After two slow hi-hat hits and a two-note walkdown comes the voice of bassist Mlny Parsonz: a deep, bellowing howl that reaches straight into the chest. She can growl, coo and seethe in one phrase without breaking the seam. To be clear, Parsonz isn't the center of Royal Thunder, as many bands with female vocalists sometimes paint themselves. She's an integral part of the psychedelic, bluesy thud that slowly spirals upward from not only "Parsonz Curse," but also the album as a whole

When I called members (and spouses) Mlny Parsonz and guitarist Josh Weaver, both agreed separately that Royal Thunder needed time to regroup after the EP, though that never meant taking a break. Between nightly practices and performances, Weaver says he dug into guitar gear as Parsonz came to terms with her lyrics and what it meant to sing them.

 

NPR: Without the benefit of a lyric sheet, I was struck by the pained threat of "Parsonz Curse." It sounds something like, "You can run, you can hide / I'm sorry that you're sorry / These walls will tear you down." What is the curse?

MP: The lyrics are actually, "You can run, you can hide / But I swear it, I swear it / These walls will tear you down." You know, I was asked recently about — more than I care to be asked — what the curse is. It's kind of a hard one for me because I... Lyrically, I wrote these words a long time ago. [I] had no idea that people would want to know so much. I thought it was just going to be this little song we played in Atlanta. I had no idea it would be on a CD.

I don't want to go into detail, because it is a part of where my family comes from and part of what my family's going through. And to give that information out seems like airing my family's dirty laundry. But I will say that there's something in my family that's been passed down the generations that I've seen in a lot of relatives on my dad's side. It's just kind of trickled down and fell on a lot of people. No one else is doomed to this curse. It's one of those things — every generation, [it hits] someone in my family. I've always seen it, because I feel like I'm a very discerning person; I can sense a lot of that stuff. Particularly, it's something that I've seen in my dad.

It's about that and what my family had to go through watching that. And that's the most I've ever told anybody. I've never even been specific about a family member, but that's a person that I had in mind when I was writing the song. It's more a song to my mother, walking her through it.

NPR: I think I understand what you're getting at — a trait or event that follows a family for generations, that's something I can relate to. I think it's something that a lot of people can relate to.

MP: And what you're saying makes me think that it's something that's not super-obvious.

NPR: It's something that hinders you.

MP: Right. And I like not being specific about it, because I don't know what you're thinking, you don't know what I'm thinking. I mean, I hope you can relate to it, and process stuff in your life with it. But like I said, I don't ever plan on telling anyone what it is, because I don't want to be a traitor.

NPR: Is it important for you to write lyrics from a personal space?

MP: Absolutely, yeah, especially on this album. I think I was afraid to on the EP. I wanted to say a lot of things, but I didn't want to be super-open. I'm open with the people that I'm close to, but I'm very protective of my personal life. But on the EP, I think there might be a sense of that holding back. On CVI, I think I kept it pretty vague, but I definitely expressed a lot of personal — every song was extremely personal to me, lyrically.

NPR: I read somewhere, Mlny, that you came to singing late in life, that you mostly screamed before. I was wondering how you discovered your voice, because I adore it every time that I listen to it. It's a rare quality when a singer actually matches the music he or she's making.

MP: Wow, thank you, man. I appreciate that. [Pauses.] Finding my voice, man. You know, I thought I found my voice in the back of a van — this sounds like it's going somewhere bad [laughs] — when I probably 6 or 7. I had been listening to so much Whitney Houston growing up and learning it on piano. I had a songbook for the piano. It was "I Wanna Dance With Somebody," and it had her on the front with a little white dress. So I got in the back of this van and had my cousins in there and my mom and my aunt, and we're driving. I was like, "I didn't learn this song on piano, but I learned how to sing 'I Wanna Dance With Somebody' by Whitney Houston." And they're all, "Oh! Let's turn off the radio, you can sing it for us." And Whitney Houston did so many awesome things with her voice. When I was a little kid, I sang like [growls], "I wanna dance with somebody," and I did that the whole time. I sang the whole song like that. I poured my heart out and the van was just silent. It was terrible. In retrospect, it was f——— horrible. They were doing everything they could not to laugh. So that was my first experience actually singing, and I didn't sing after that. I just didn't. I think I grabbed my guitar a couple times and played for my dad, and he'd be like, "You done yet?" So my experiences with singing were pretty bad.

By the time I got to high school, I have this memory of being in somebody's basement with some band and my friend says, "Hey, grab one of these microphones. We're going to do some grindcore stuff. Just f—- around." So I grabbed one of the mics and just started screaming, doing like grindcore/death-metal stuff. And everyone just started laughing. I'm like, "Oh, God, here we go again." But they were laughing because they liked it.

NPR: How did Royal Thunder discover that you could sing?

MP: You know, [Royal Thunder] had been instrumental for a while and gone through some changes. Josh found a drummer, and it worked out great with the drummer. The drummer's like, "We need a bass player and a singer." And Josh says, "Oh, Mel plays bass and I'm sure she'll sing." I'm like, "Uhhh." I come into the room and he says, "Grab a bass and just kind of throw some lyrics on there, sing something." It was just one of those moments where it was like, "This is it. You're the singer." I was actually pretty bummed that I had to do it. I don't think I really wanted to. I was too shy about it.

NPR: The songs on the Royal Thunder EP were not necessarily short, but definitely punchy — something you might've heard on '70s FM radio. CVI develops more. Have you been listening to more Led Zeppelin?

JW: No, a lot of what happened was after the EP — I'm really into musical gear, and with this new album, I started experimenting with different guitar fuzz pedals and different effects. I've heard the Led Zeppelin comparison, and I definitely love Zeppelin. Led Zeppelin was one of those bands that I got into later on in life, actually the past couple of years. They've definitely become one of my favorite rock bands.

NPR: Then aside from some sweet gear, what brought you to these more extended takes? I mean, it's not a matter of being longer; it's more taking a riff and bringing it to its natural state. I'm wondering how you got there.

JW: From the time that we did the EP until the recording of CVI, we had been playing non-stop. We'd pretty much practice every day and we'd play shows all of the time, so it's that and me getting into more gear, and all of us growing as musicians and really just honing in our sound. I think that the songwriting's become more natural, and not just a riff, as you said.

NPR: What is the significance of the album title, CVI? Those are the Roman numerals for 106.

JW: It seems like one of those strange mysteries in my life and in Mel's life and a few close friends that the number 106 follows us everywhere. I can't explain it. I don't know what it means.

NPR: Where has 106 shown up for you?

JW: I see it everywhere. I have a good friend — his birthday is on January 6. There was a track that I did a scratch guitar on, and me and the producer were trying to figure out the beats per minute. It actually ended up being 106 beats per minute. It was like, "Damn, man." It was just hard to believe. That's just one example of it.

NPR: As someone who grew up in Georgia, I'm always happy to discover great bands from my home state. But having grown up in the Atlanta suburbs, I know that Atlanta is a different beast from what's considered "The South" — a culture that I treasure, but know is often misunderstood. Does the notion of "region" matter at all to you as a musician, either alone or as a part of Royal Thunder? I know you didn't grow up the South, Mlny.

JW: To a degree, I think so. I think where you're from definitely comes out in your music in one way or another.

MP: No. But I do think where you come from or where the music's coming from, I think it does have an effect on people. As far as Atlanta goes, it's kind of a melting pot for people of the South. A lot of people from around there and bands in Atlanta now — a lot of us come from the suburbs, and Atlanta's kind of a place to feel like you belong. In some ways, I can see how it affects Josh, he being truly raised in the South. He's so Southern to me. I think there's a bluesiness to being in the South. I think there's a sorrow.

The second video from The Magnetic Fields 2012 album Love at the Bottom of the Sea is called 'Quick!' It's, of course, about love — in this case the tangling, strangling end to a love.

The song features vocals from Shirley Simms with harmonies from Claudia Gonson. It also features lyrics by Stephin Merritt and those lyrics are blunt counterpoint to the sweet love story you'll see in this new video. Some of the lyrics to 'Quick!' are:

"You better think of something quick because my suitcase is packed
Quick, because I'm through being attacked
Are you really prepared to lose
All this just to air your views?"

The video, about a trash can-bound lover seeking same, is directed by James Spinney.

Few flamboyant men fill the stages at shows I go to these days. One exception: " target="_blank">fun. We webcast that band's show from the 9:30 Club last week and though lead singer Nate Ruess was no Freddie Mercury, he did have great talent and that charisma Mercury had when I saw Queen in the mid-seventies. In fact, Ruess also has a bit of Mercury's throaty voice and style.

The glam rock of the 1970s made for some astonishing concerts. Perhaps dressing up and putting on makeup was cheaper than flashy tech, though both would eventually find a home together. So for many reasons, including musically, fun. got me thinking about Queen and what a phenomenon they were as a band with Mercury in command. So for this Old Music Tuesday let's listen to a bit of Queen.

This is from their later years. Not so much glam as sheer command and an astonishing presence. This 1985 concert at Wembley Stadium, for Live Aid, was seen by 1.9 billion people on TV and 72,000 at the event. And though Queen played a lot of huge venues, the reaction during "Radio Ga Ga" was something the band had never seen before.

By the way, there's a wonderful feature on Freddie Mercury, part of a series we did called '50 Great Voices'. Take a few minutes to discover a bit more about Mercury than you already might know.

Here are some other Old Music Tuesdays.

I can pinpoint the exact moment that I decided I loved "Hey Tovarich," the new music video from Russia's Mumiy Troll. About halfway through the video, there's a quick clip of singer Ilya Lagutenko bewigged and looking like a very mellow Bob Ross. On his canvas aren't happy little trees, but gigantic explosions.

You might have heard of Mumiy Troll when it represented Russia in the 2002, Eurovision song contest, but it's been making waves in Russia for almost thirty years. The band's songs have a dark swagger — a smirking glam rock style that can be both creepy and funny at the same. "Hey Tovarish," the single off the band's first-ever English language album, starts off as a song about "best looking ladies" and quickly turns into something stranger. The horns and throbbing bass kick in and Laguntenko sings lyrics like "Beat the leach / Suck pain till the last drop."

The video for "Hey Tovarish" has the same surreal/sinister twist. A kid, identified as Mumiy Troll's number one fan, flips through TV channels to watch all of his favorite Mumiy Troll programming. Laguntenko appears as a bumbling '70s variety show frontman, an out of control anime Power Rangers-style rocker and an unnerving Blues Clues-esque Steve lookalike. That would make for a pretty fun concept by itself, but what's supposed to be the real world — the kid watching TV — becomes more dream-like as the video goes on. By the time the boy is placed onto a scooter, doing donuts to a cheering crowd, the video has evolved from a sequence of homages to a bizarre, saxophone-filled nightmare.

In an email, Mumiy Troll frontman Ilya Lagutenko talked to us about the meaning of "Hey Tovarish":

This is the first video from our debut English album Vladivostok. Whatever the song is about (it's actually about our guitarist who's always fussing over his girlfriends, but hush hush ... that's a secret) we wanted it to sound like an introduction to a band that's willing to become your best friend. Reaching an audience that knows very little Russian, is unfamiliar with the our band and usually only thinks of Russia in terms of the Soviet Empire and Cold War is not easy.

We're kind of like the kid in the video, dreaming of becoming international rock stars. Like him, we believe pursuing your dream is a reward in and of itself. As a bonus, when you watch the video and listen the song you learn at least ONE word in Russian. "Tovarish" means Comrade and Amigo at the same time. And you don't even have to see a single Russian spy, mafioso or pretty blond in the video! Amazing, yes?

Director S.F. Porcaro adds:

From the start, this was a great project to be involved in. Ilya's only real requirement was to make it fun and unique. Other than that, he was pretty much open to anything. Game on.

The trickiest part was trying to come up with something humorous that was also appropriate for the song, since it has a very epic and dramatic feel. The idea of a kid flipping through the channels looking for cartoons, only to continually find the band, seemed like a good place to start. Then came the scooter and the fans, which helped enhance the dream-like feel to the whole thing.

I was fortunate that [the whole band] were all really nice guys. When working with rock stars, especially ones as successful as Mumiy Troll, you never know what you're going to get. But they were a joy, and really fun to work with.

Need a Monday morning pick-me-up? Animal Collective has just posted two new songs on its website and you can listen now. "Honeycomb" is the bouncy one with the trademark harmonies. "Gotham" is the comparatively pensive one with lots of echo.

Judging by the cover art on the website, both songs were produced by Animal Collective with Ben H. Allen III, who also worked on the band's last full-length album, 2009's Merriweather Post Pavilion.

Both songs are available digitally now, and will be out on a seven-inch on June 26.