Two years ago, British music journalist Will Hodgkinson crossed over from gazing wannabe to playing musician by teaching himself guitar in six months and documenting the journey in the book Guitar Man. The Da Capo Press has recently published his follow-up, Song Man, with the author writing his own song and recording it as a single. Subtitled A Melodic Adventure, or, My Single-Minded Approach to Songwriting, Hodgkinson cashes in on his Rolodex as a writer for Mojo and the Daily Telegraph and enlists superstars for encouragement and insight, from Keith Richards to Ray Davies to Chan Marshall.

Sad, tortured and painfully blundering, the acquired taste of Neil Hamburger and his stand-up routines are deliciously subversive, much to the delight of Tom Green and musicians Tenacious D, for whom he opened for on the group's international Pick of Destiny tour. Channeling Pat Paulsen, William Shatner, and Andy Kaufman, Hamburger's latest anti-humor antics snuggle up to the heartland, looking for love and a little respect in Neil Hamburger Sings Country Winners, out this week on the Drag City Records imprint. And not since Ween sucked on a sprig of hay dipped in PCP in 1996 with 12 Golden Country Greats has country music been strangled so wonderfully. Backed by a killer barnyard band featuring Tubes drummer Prairie Prince and Link Wray bassist Atom Ellis, Hamburger chews up (and spits out) the bucolic landscape with tear-jerkers "Please Ask That Clown to Stop Crying" and "Three Piece Chicken Dinner." He holds hands with the eternally despaired in "Garden Party II" and turns in a wild cover of John Entwistle's "Thinkin' It Over" (from his 1972 Whistle Rhymes album). Do a YouTube search for the video of "Jug Town" and catch the fever.

On March 8, the Quad City Symphony Orchestra announced that Mark Russell Smith would be its new music director and conductor. And as the Minneapolis-based musician serves as artistic director of orchestral studies at the University of Minnesota, director of new-music projects for the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, and music director for Virginia's Richmond Symphony Orchestra, his current positions alone made him sound an appropriate, and sufficiently intimidating, choice.

Yet a day before our recent phone interview, Smith received an e-mail from the Quad City Symphony Orchestra that managed to intimidate even him - a document, he says, titled "Repertoire from 1917 through 2007," listing every piece the venerable area institution has performed publicly during those nine decades.

Wow, I say.

"I know," he says. "It's a little light reading."

An anomaly in today's hit-driven radio, WFMU-FM is an oasis in the New York marketplace. Founded in the late 1950s as a part of Upsala College and becoming independent in 1994, the beloved station is one of this country's last bastions of noncommercial, "free form" programming, with music selected by the eclectic taste and knowledge of the DJ, not some industry consultant. With madcap zeal and the battle cry of artistic freedom, the station has served as a musical education and inspirational soundtrack to the brightest and best minds within its reach, documented by its beautifully garish program guide, LCD (Lowest Common Denominator). The publication ceased in 1998, but for those of us who missed out the first time, senior disc jockey Dave the Spazz has assembled The Best of LCD: The Art & Writing of WFMU-FM 91.1FM, recently published by the Princeton Architectural Press. From missives on "monster punk garage music" to Dadaists Coyle & Sharpe to anti-rock-and-roll books from the born-again community to songwriter Doc Pomus, every page is an eyeball-twitching, gut-busting wonder.