Tamar Brott, on growing up with two music prodigies, and Sandra Tsing Loh's sister Kaitlin, a ballet prodigy.

Sure you can try to get your pop songs onto records, or on the radio, or onto MTV. But what happens if your medium of choice is ... the telephone? Before they had record contracts, the band They Might Be Giants distributed their songs through the medium of Answering Machine.

A case study of how children are asked to live the unlived lives of their parents. Author David Sedaris had a father who loved jazz but played no instrument himself.

Sarah Vowell with Jim Nayder, host of Magnificent Obsession and The Annoying Music Show, who personifies our culture's split between seriousness and wackiness as well as anyone.

As a teenager, Sarah Vowell was not casual about music lessons — music became her life. She was in marching band, jazz band, Band One, symphony band, pep band and the Bozeman Recorder Ensemble.

Alex Melamid and Vitaly Komar hired a polling firm to investigate what people want to see in paintings. Then, using the data, they painted what people want.

Writer Greil Marcus explains what rock fans use dead rock stars for.

Durrell was a professional musician. He toured Asia, Brazil, Canada, gigs in Paris.

Then Chicago-radio-listener and writer Alex Blumberg (he's now one of our producers) tells the story of encountering a corporation on its first day. It made all the human errors anyone does on a first day: exhibiting false confidence, pretending it wasn't the first day, trying too hard.