A few weeks ago, Sandra Bernhard was in town along with her pal, Rosanne Cash for a Wits appearance at The Fitzgerald Theater. She took a few minutes to drop by for a Theft Of The Dial session before that show.

The Sam Roberts band, the five-person Canadian indie-rock band led by their namesake singer-songwriter, recently released their fourth full-length album, Collider. The album offers more of the band's trademark catchy, classic-rock-infused style, but features surprising and interesting guest contributions from members of Chicago rockers Califone and Afrobeat revivalists Antibalas.

How does a band like Face Candy bounce back from losing its founder and one of its core members, Michael "Eyedea" Larsen, this past October? By releasing a new album, of course. The jazz/rap/trip-hop/improvisational group's latest release, Waste Age Teen Land, is the last album Eyedea performed on and produced before his untimely death.

As they effortlessly fold ideas from the rock, hip-hop, global traditional musics and electronic dance music into their sound, Gang Gang Dance forge a new type of "world music" where all of the world's music is potentially collapsible into a new hallucinatory Western pop.

Does a whole equal the sum of its parts? For Thao Nguyen and Mirah Yom Tov Zeitlyn, two accomplished solo artists plus producer Merrill Garbus of tUnE-yArDs, equals a complementary push-pull of an album.

Unusual for most artists, each member of the band Sloan, which has maintained the same lineup for decades, contributes equally to songwriting. And at their live shows, each member switches instruments accordingly. They got their name from a friend, who was nicknamed "the Slow One" by his boss, but in the man's French accent, it sounded more like "Sloan."

When Ryan Schreiber founded a small internet music zine in 1995 while living in Minneapolis, he had no idea it would turn into what Pitchfork Media is today.

The famously Scottish four-piece Glasvegas (you don't have to listen hard to hear those Glasgow accents) has been called the next step in UK rock evolution after the Libertines and the Arctic Monkeys. Short-listed for the 2009 Mercury Prize, Glasvegas frontmen and cousins James and Rab Allan hope their lush, emphatic arena rock and emotionally dramatic songwriting inspire fans at their live shows to "lose their inhibitions, get a little bit inebriated, have some romance with a stranger."

The Okee Dokee Brothers talk about their trip down the Mississippi.

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