Benanti: I always felt schizophrenic as a kid because I loved musicals so much but then I also loved these rock and pop and folk artists, too.

WSJ: Laura Benanti gets in a cabaret mood

That album generated three Top 20 hits and helped Hornsby win the Best New Artist Grammy, and it laid the groundwork for a wildly diverse career encompassing jazz, pop, classical, bluegrass, folk, rock and Vaudeville.

NPR: Bruce Hornsby: From Jazz to Folk to Rock

An up-and-coming folk-rock singer-songwriter who crafts brooding, timeless, sophisticated pop songs, Elvis Perkins has earned lofty comparisons to the likes of Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan.

NPR: Elvis Perkins In Dearland, Live In Concert

Animal Collective's latest CD, on the Domino label, is the appropriately named Strawberry Jam: a sticky-sweet mixture of mashed-up musical elements, from noise pop and fringe folk to ambient drones and psychedelia, with crunchy seeds of noise rock.

NPR: Animal Collective in Concert

Philadelphia's The Asteroid No. 4 takes dreamy shoegazer pop and mixes in elements of '60s psychedelia and latter-day space rock to create a folk-rock sound that falls somewhere between The Byrds and The Stone Roses.

NPR: The Asteroid No. 4: 'Let It Go'