Sometimes, the stories heard about the making of iconic albums seem as though that famous Las Vegas expression should be applied: What happens in the studio, stays in the studio. These stories range from inspirational to entertaining to worrisome.

This week we’re going to talk about Lego bricks.

A new study shows that athletes in different sports are all better at quieting their brains and focusing on what's really going on. The researchers say this could even mean prescribing sports for people with audio processing disorders.

On January 1, a new batch of copyrighted materials entered the public domain. For 20 years between 1998 and 2018, the U.S. release of public domain works was suspended following a grim corporate lobbying campaign by the Walt Disney Corporation.

Ludwig von Beethoven’s unfinished last symphony is being completed by artificial intelligence, Yahoo! reports. The decision to use AI is polarizing in the classical musical community, but Beethoven’s work in particular has been the subject of a lot of technological attention for decades.

One 2017 study is emblematic of existing thinking about chords. “To achieve greatness, a song needs a sudden chord change, according to U.S. neuroscientists who examined 545 top-selling pop songs from more than three decades,” the Daily Mail wrote in its coverage.

Metallica is absolutely wild. This is a band whose last six albums—new studio albums of all new material, released in the 2010s—have debuted at #1 on the Billboard albums chart, tying them in a beautiful improbability knot with Dave Matthews Band.

This folk-rock supergroup fought, broke up, and reunited enough times and ways to make Fleetwood Mac’s heads spin. Each member had a back catalog with at least one other group, and each brought ambitions and ideas whose reach exceeded the grasp of those other gigs.

The English band synthesized the sounds of the first wave of British Invasion bands into an intricate and massively loud new subgenre. Then they began to fall apart.

Like the iconic rainbow prism from Dark Side of the Moon, the English band broke homogeneous popular rock music into a dazzling and beautiful array of parts.

The Eagles are an enigma. They’re both a massive cultural joke and one of the bestselling bands in the world to this day. And their reputation as great white temper babies, earned with public fights and a rotating-door lineup, was so vital to the band’s image that they named their 1994 reunion album Hell Freezes Over.

The commercial heyday of Fleetwood Mac came in the late 1970s, but the band had a long life and rotating cast long before and after that time. I’ve picked 11 songs from that 50-year period as exemplars of the shifting notion and long narrative of Fleetwood Mac.

Famous now as the shallow and demispiritual leader of the Parrotheads, Jimmy Buffett also wrote some of the most beautiful and substantial songs of the late 20th century. He lived in various places, flirted with several colleges around the Gulf before getting a degree in history, and worked both as a yachtie and as a music journalist very early in his career.

Laura Shigihara is a composer whose music has appeared in dozens of games, including To the Moon. Shigihara’s 2017 game Rakuen tells a completely new story of her own using RPG Maker as the game engine. Writing Novel Ties is such a pleasure, because I love the kinds of games I get to write about. They’re well written and charming, but they’re also generally lower cost and less reliant on hardware and flashy graphics. And their creators are as varied as you’d expect from comparable genres of wri

This spring, you can see the Rolling Stones in their 55th year of touring. The cheapest tickets for the opening show in Miami are nearly $300, and the cheapest tickets at the closing shows in Chicago are also nearly $300, excluding the spaceship upper-atmosphere deck of Soldier Field, which is about $250. And those are just the nosebleeds.