Several years ago musician John Doe toured with Wilco, who were taking fans' requests of what songs the group should perform onstage through their Website. That gave Doe an idea of doing something similar for his own band, X. So for the Los Angeles punk group's current 'Total Request Live' tour, X fans have the opportunity to vote for their favorite X songs for the band to play in their city. "It's fun," Doe, 56, tells Spinner about the experience. "It's a little bit more work but I have made so many set lists [that] it's not difficult."

On the group's official site, xtheband.com, fans can pick their five favorite X tunes from a list of approximately 40 songs prior to the group arriving at a tour stop. So far, it's led to some interesting picks. "'The Have Nots' was the biggest surprise," Doe says. "Even when we wrote it and released it, we didn't play it that much. Another big surprise was 'Under the Big Black Sun.' We never played that one very much either. It's also a little surprising that each night is very different."

Dredg frontman Gavin Hayes admits to Spinner that Pink Floyd's 'Dark Side of the Moon' is such a sick concept album that he remains "quite jealous of it." That might also explain Dredg's predisposition for recording concept albums. Or, at least, thematic ones. Initially inspired by a Salvador Dali painting, the band's stand-out 2002 disc 'El Cielo' dealt largely with sleep paralysis and their latest, 'The Pariah, The Parrot, The Delusion' was directly influenced by a Salmon Rushdie essay entitled 'Imagine There's No Heaven: A Letter to the 6 Billionth Citizen.'

"The concept unfolded after we had written a few songs," Hayes tells Spinner, recalling that guitarist Mark Engles stumbled across the essay and realized the content was directly applicable to material they had already been working on. "From that point on, we used the essay as an influence and template for the writing and art direction."

Rather than take the traditional released route with his new EP, "Weird Al" Yankovic embraced the inevitable, titled it 'Internet Leaks' and started putting out the tracks one at a time digitally. "My next album isn't going to be out for quite some time, I'm guessing next year, but I wanted to give the fans something new to keep them excited," Yankovic tells Spinner. "I thought 'you know, there's no point in holding these tracks back' so I decided instead of having them illegally to the Internet, I'll just leak them myself."

After last year's fast food-themed parody of T.I.'s 'Whatever You Like' and last month's Doors-inspired 'Craigslist,' the three remaining tracks from 'Internet Leaks' will be released over the course of the summer. "They're all originals, mostly style parodies of other artists and bands," Yankovic says, refusing to reveal any more about the content. "While 'Craigslist' was a live action video, the other three will be animated. I'm very happy with them and I hope the fans respond to them."

Sound Tribe Sector Nine are building a house in New Orleans but it's not called the Rising Sun. And they're not building it literally because they'll be too busy hitting all the major summer festivals nationwide, but they are doing their part.

It's part of the band's 2009 'Make It Right' drive in which STS9, who have a long history of social activism and charitable fundraising, are focusing all their energy on just one cause for the year: building a house in New Orleans for residents of the Katrina-torn Lower Ninth Ward.

"After visiting New Orleans multiple times since the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, we realized we wanted to try and build a house," bassist David Murphy tells Spinner. To break ground for it, figuratively speaking, the band just released remixes of their most recent CD, 2008's 'Peaceblaster.' Featured remix masterminds on 'Peaceblaster: The New Orleans Make It Right Remixes' include the Glitch Mob, Pretty Lights, Nosaj Thang, Lazor Sword, Bluetech, Telepath and Ott.

U2 kicked off a world tour in Barcelona this week, and even paid tribute to Michael Jackson by dedicating 'Angel of Harlem' to the late singer, weaving in pieces of Jackson's 'Man in the Mirror' and 'Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough' toward the end of the performance.

But before U2 embarked on their current trek, dubbed the 360° Tour, they played a short string of intimate U.S. gigs in March. One of these performances was at the historic Somerville Theatre just outside of Boston, which houses less than 900 people in its audience. Check out an exclusive video from that evening of the band rocking out to 'Get On Your Boots,' the lead single from 2009's 'No Line On the Horizon.'

As the frontwoman of Spinnerette, Brody Dalle is used to the attention that comes with her position at center stage. Being the sole human focus of her outfit's videos, however, isn't something she's comfortable with yet. "Yeah, it's weird," she tells Spinner of the new video for 'Baptized by Fire,' from the band's self-titled debut, which features Dalle all alone on a mysterious beach. "I didn't really want to do that."

Originally, Dalle's longtime pal, Spinnerette guitarist Tony Bevilacqua, was set to appear as a "black figure looming around in the background," but he bowed out before the shoot because he "thought it was going to take away from the whole thing," according to Dalle. Under the direction of Brit Chris Hopewell, whose pedigree includes Radiohead's 'There There,' and The Killers' 'Smile Like You Mean It,' Dalle, sans Tony, spent two days in front of the camera on a windy beach in Dungeness, England, earlier this year for the video. "There was like this incessant wind," she says of the chilly shoot. "It was like the coast of England. It's like Kent or some s--- like that and it's like godd--- freezing. It never is not windy."

''Lonesome" George Thorogood is far better equipped than most to speak about the ongoing steroids controversy in baseball. Prior to being 'Bad to the Bone,' Thorogood was a semi-pro baseball player who, even today, speaks as passionately about Sandy Koufax versus Bob Gibson as the Rolling Stones versus the Beatles.

So, who does the guitar slinger think is responsible for the steroids controversy that has dogged baseball for more than a decade and has implicated such major players as Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire, Roger Clemens and Alex Rodriguez? "If Keith Richards wrote the number one song of all time back in 1973 and he was mixing cocaine with heroin to do it, what do you think the president of that company and the producer of the record would give him?" Thorogood asks Spinner. "They all understood what was going on. Everybody knew what was going on. Nobody cared because the ball was going into the seats. That thing had been going on for years; somebody was gonna find an edge."