Music

Once upon a time, Jenny Lewis was one of those child actors you might have seen on shows like Growing Pains and Mr. Belvedere. But then she started making music, and in the late '90s that started taking off. Once her band Rilo Kiley started scoring hits, it was hard to go back to sitcoms.

Marisa Anderson knows where American guitar music has been and where it is now, and probably possesses an inkling of where it can go. She's studied the history and musical nuance of blues, country and folk music through and through, and ingests it all in a style that's as raw as it true. But mostly, Anderson just wants to kick up some dirt — which isn't easy here, given that the NPR Music offices are relatively clean. (Mind the towering stacks of CDs, though. They could topple over at any time.)

World Cafe's week-long series Sense of Place: Iceland draws to a close with an unexpected treat. We'd been in Reykjavik for a few days when we learned that June 17 would mark a daylong celebration of Icelandic National Day, the anniversary of Iceland's independence from Denmark in 1944. Events planned for the holiday ranged from outdoor chess matches to accordion concerts, culminating in a free outdoor show for an audience expected to hit 10,000.

It's been 20 years since the stoner-metal caravan Sleep wrote Dopesmoker, a 63-minute track based on a single riff and dedicated to the mighty spliff. Unfortunately, it took three labels and a span of 16 years to release it as intended.