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For decades, bandleader Skitch Henderson set the mood for Tonight Show audiences. Liane Hansen talks with the man who has just been honored with the James Smithson Bicentennial Medal from the Smithsonian Institution for his contributions to American culture.

It's the era of Twilight, and pop culture is swarming with the undead. Terry Gross talks to Academy Award-winning actress Anna Paquin, star of HBO's vampire series True Blood.

The craft brewing industry is worth almost $30 billion. What's the future look like?

The Scottish synth-pop band turns up with a small arsenal of synthesizers to perform highlights from last year's album The Bones of What You Believe.

Four decades after their sound helped redefine popular music, the German synthesizer quartet is playing a series of eight concerts at New York's Museum of Modern Art.

E. T. Mensah, who died 20 years ago, played highlife, an offshoot of jazz that for years was the most popular style of music in southern Africa. Milo Miles reviews a new anthology of Mensah's music.

Rock historian Ed Ward says that musicians in Düsseldorf, Germany, including Klaus Dinger of the band Neu!, helped start a new German pop movement in the 1970s and '80s.

NPR's Sarah McCammon grew up in a conservative evangelical home in the Midwest. When Prince died and purple filled her newsfeeds, she felt like an outsider watching a ritual she couldn't fully join.

"The whole world is singing in Spanish," says singer Luis Fonsi. How the mainstreaming of reggaeton, the ubiquity of streaming services and some queasy culture clashes gave us the song of the summer.

Wallie was a working dog whose primary disappointment in an otherwise charmed life is that she didn’t have enough, or really, any work to do. We acquired her nine years ago, after my daughter Gracie filled out an online family personality profile and Wallie’s breed popped us as the answer do our dog-owning dreams.