Born and raised in Neptune City, NJ, singer-songwriter Nicole Atkins lived up and down the east coast before settling in New York to write her debut album about her hometown. Atkins was approached by friend and now band-mate Dan Chen in 2005 to start a new band, The Sea, based on the songs Atkins had on her MySpace page.

Tokyo Police Club is a group of four friends from Newmarket Ontario who picked up instruments and formed a band in their senior year of high school. Their debut EP A Lesson In Crime was written up everywhere from indie blogs to Rolling Stone who gushed it had, "seven first-rate mod-punk party starters." Elephant Shell, the debut full-length, is due at the end of April.

The Heavy hail from Noid, a small town in southwest of England. The band will be lumped in with the retro-soul revival, but The Heavy add cool lo-fi samples and facemelting guitar solos to create a one of a kind groove that's heavy, dirty, and funky.

Baltimore duo Jenn Wasner and Andy Stack chose the name Wye Oak after they realized Monarch, their first choice for a name had already been claimed by 7 other bands. Their recorded sound is layered and lush. They try to capture that same sound when the two of them perform live, but they also feel that if a song is good enough, it should be able to stand on its own.

Devonte Hynes used to draw a comic strip called Lightspeed Champion to kill time while he was in math class. When his indie-buzz band Test Icicles broke up in 2006, Hynes resurrected the name for his new project.

No, Carbon/Silicon isn't a chemistry lesson about the periodic table of elements. It's a collaboration between The Clash's Mick Jones and Tony James of the Billy Idol-fronted Generation X, which sounds more like dance rock rather than their punk roots.

Here's the short story: being compared to Al Green, he recorded three soul singles in the early 1970s, disappeared for 25 years until BBC Radio 1 host Gilles Peterson brought Darondo, also known as Double D or Dynamite D, out of hiding in 2005 on his "Gilles Peterson Digs America" compilation. That's also the long story.

With a music career spanning over two decades, the sometimes folk and sometimes punk singer/songwriter Billy Bragg has teamed up with legendary artists like Wilco and Johnny Marr (The Smiths) as well as new artists like Kate Nash in addition to his abundant solo work.

Zooey Deschanel and M. Ward first met when they were recording a Richard Thompson song for a movie soundtrack. The actress and the singer-songwriter hit it off and soon after that, Deschanel shared with Ward some of the songs she had written. Volume One is their first CD together.

The Duke Spirit is coming to America again, despite a 2006 tour that saw all their gear stolen in Portland and a broken elbow for bassist Toby Butler in Las Vegas.