Modest Mouse’s ‘07 disc, We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank, is so awesome that we were inspired to dial up frontman Isaac Brock and find out what’s on tap. “My big priority is to finish up this Modest Mouse EP,” he reports, adding that tunes like “The Whale Song,” “Satellite Skin” and a track with the Dirty Dozen Brass Band (”The horns are frickin’ rad!”) are all repolished outtakes from MM’s last two discs. Also, Brock has been fishing with the Shins‘ James Mercer (”I haven’t caught a thing”), is building a workshop in his basement (”I need a nice bed frame”) and will sing with Frank Black and the Catholics on a re-creation of Lee Hazlewood’s ‘63 debut, Trouble Is a Lonesome Town. Finally, Brock told us that he and Johnny Marr will start writing new tunes in March and that in the spring, MM will hit the road with R.E.M. Says Brock, “I’m not really good at taking it easy.”

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“If I cloned myself many times over, started a choir, and that choir sang music influenced by midcentury pop — with a lot of great musicians.” That’s how actress Zooey Deschanel describes Version One, her first album, on which she collaborated with the brilliant M. Ward. The duo, a.k.a. She and Him, first duetted on a cover of Richard and Linda Thompson’s “When I Get to the Border” while working on the soundtrack to her 2007 film The Go-Getter. “I sent him some of my home demos, and he suggested we record them with some incredible musicians that he knew in Portland [Oregon],” Deschanel tells the S.S. With a band augmented by piano (played by Deschanel), strings and pedal steel, her jazzy lilt soars over cuts like “I Thought I Saw Your Face Today” and “This Is Not a Test.” “I have been writing music since I was a little girl, but the record features songs written over the last seven years or so,” she says. “It was a lovely, once-in-a-lifetime gem of a creative experience.” Yes!

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What to do on a night off in Nashville? Well, the S.S. dialed up the Kings of Leon, who’d just returned from New Zealand, where they’d wrapped up touring behind Because of the Times. Coincidentally, it was singer Caleb Followill’s twenty-sixth birthday, and the party raged at Springwater, one of Music City’s shittiest (or greatest) dive bars. Mom hired a cover band, who busted out Creedence and Petty, and we also toasted bassist Jared’s recent engagement to his lovely GF. Sipping the sweet Jameson, Caleb told us that he was bearing down on the band’s fourth album and to expect more rock & roll, “with some of the most beautiful melodies you’ve ever heard.” At least that’s what we thought he said.