Titty bars are scarce to be seen in Rock N Roll Jesus, the most recent release by the American Bad Ass, which is proof that he really is all about the music.

There’s always been a place in record-nerd world for bands whose publicity stills depict boys and girls picnicking beside sun-dappled rivers, or whose songs are typically about sweaters, boating, and turtles. Indeed, a blog entry on Allmusic last week entitled “Twee as Ducks: Indie Pop Summer Crushes 2008” rounded up this year’s crop of cutesy perennials.

The Ontario writer and musician says storytelling runs through all her work, no matter what form it comes in, but that it’s very rare that a song or a spoken-word piece is born from a single source.

When it came time for Matt Mays + El Torpedo to record Terminal Romance, the follow-up to their self-titled debut of 2005, the Nova Scotia–spawned quartet didn’t mess around. Chris Tsangarides (Thin Lizzy, Black Sabbath, Judas Priest) was hired to produce and engineer, Mike Fraser (Joe Satriani, AC/DC, Van Halen) to mix, and Bob Ludwig (most every rock band in the world) to master.

From writing symphonies for the Boston Orchestra to playing duets with Willie Nelson, scoring soundtracks for documentaries on his beloved hometown, New Orleans or executive producing a movie, the famous trumpeter does it all.

Over the past 14 years, the Toilet has trudged drunkenly through seven-hour sets, “channelled the universe”, and paid tribute to Bob Dylan’s worst album. Now the group has made "the most amazing disappointing second album ever".

Twenty years ago, if you’d told Michael Occhipinti that the best record of his career would feature the rustic sounds of the Sicilian tarantella he would have thought you were crazy. Of course, he knew what it sounded like: growing up in a musical family with Sicilian roots, it was the soundtrack to weddings and parties throughout his childhood.

Few musicians can honestly say that they changed the way their instruments are heard. And that goes double for double bassists, who more often provide unobtrusive support than solo star turns. Yet Miroslav Vitous, who left his native Prague for New York in 1966 (in time to miss the Russian invasion), almost instantly raised the bar for improvising bass players.

It’s suppertime in Amsterdam when I reach Dutch keyboardist and bandleader Cor Fuhler, but he willingly breaks off his meal, over my protests, to chat with Canada. Still, food is on both of our minds: Fuhler’s for obvious reasons, and mine because his Corkestra CD evokes in me an extraordinary synesthetic response. Sure, I can hear and enjoy the music, I tell him, but I can also taste it, and its flavour is both sweet and sour.

If you think you know what a bass sounds like, take a listen to Renaud Garcia-Fons’s brilliant live recording Arcoluz. On several of the tracks you’d swear he was playing a cello or a viola, at times even a violin. But as the DVD that comes with the album reveals, the 45-year-old Frenchman coaxes all the timbres, tones, and textures from a five-string upright double bass.

For the record—and contrary to information published on Wikipedia and in numerous articles—the Constantines are not named after author Alex Constantine. In fact, vocalist-guitarist Bryan Webb confesses to having only a vague knowledge of the self-styled “antifascist researcher”, whose incendiary book The Covert War Against Rock examined the deeper mysteries behind the killing of John Lennon, among others.

Along with the kind of gritty, triple-guitar southern rock their fans adore, the Drive-By Truckers are known for delivering the goods in the album-art department. For the last seven years, their recordings have featured the southern-gothic work of Virginia-based Wes Freed, whose dark depictions of ghoulish skeleton-rockers, barren graveyards, and flaming muscle cars tearing up country roads at twilight help illustrate the brooding, intense tone of the music within.

When asked what the Italian DJ duo Crookers is hoping to accomplish on its inaugural North American tour, DJ BOT responds flatly, “Not to die,” before adding, “This is the first time we’re doing a tour like this, with a gig almost every day.”

Somewhere in between almost missing his stop on the subway, telling his friends to shut the fuck up, and giving his mother a hug, former line cook Meric Long explains how he came to form the Dodos with Bay Area native (and balls-to-the-wall percussionist) Logan Kroeber.

Sean Scolnick’s metamorphosis into Langhorne Slim came about completely naturally, but that doesn’t mean it’s been painless. Right from the point that underground Americana disciples discovered the singer-songwriter, through the 2005 roots raver When the Sun’s Gone Down, there have been questions. The biggest one is how someone raised in the well-to-do, whiter-than-Colombian-snow borough of Langhorne, Pennsylvania ended up sounding like a southern-gothic shit-kicker.