“Where did punk rock start? Who cares? It’s not where did it start, it’s why did it start?” said Bob Mould in 1981. Before the Bob Mould Band and Sugar, before a prolific solo career, Mould was part of punk mainstays Hüsker Dü. Jeff Severns Guntzel looks at Mould’s Minneapolis origins and the unbroken line—personal, musical, and political—linking his work with the band and all that has come since.

“One cannot categorize [John] Zorn,” says cellist Fred Sherry, who dubs the New York music icon “a big subject: friend, composer, wild man, confidante, connoisseur, dreamer, idealist.” In a two-part online celebration of Zorn’s 60th birthday, we asked 60 artists, poets, and musicians—including Yoko Ono, Meredith Monk, and Terry Riley—to share their reflections on a music pioneer.

When we asked an array of musicians and artists—including Laurie Anderson, Nels Cline, and Bill Frisell—to share their reflections about John Zorn on the occasion of his 60th birthday, three words kept recurring: “visionary,” “mensch,” “dude.” In a two-part celebration of Zorn’s sixth decade, we share 60 birthday wishes for this celebrated improviser, experimenter, and genre-jumping producer.

Paul Douglas considers himself an “albino unicorn.” A moderate Republican, he’s also a meteorologist who believes climate change is real. Music-theater artist Cynthia Hopkins decided to make art about the crisis after a 2010 Arctic expedition. In a recent interview, the pair discusses global warming and ways that art, science, and spirituality can work together to change minds about a changing planet.

Swapping roles as interviewer and interviewed, percussionists Glenn Kotche (Wilco) and Martin Dosh (Dosh, Andrew Bird) share a bit of common time to ruminate on influences, matters of style, and “Ah-ha!” moments. Repeat performers at the Walker—Kotche at Rock the Garden 2003 and Dosh at a festival in his honor in 2008—the pair opens an insider’s window into the world of the professional drummer.

During a 2010 trip to the Arctic, Cynthia Hopkins serenaded a sailing vessel, the Noorderlicht, that carried her and other artists on what she calls a “lucky, life-transforming” journey. First sung with ukelele accompaniment on the ship’s deck, the song is now part of Hopkins’ new climate-themed music-theater work, one she characterizes as a “love song to the miraculous clemency of our world.”

“A synaesthetic fantasia, DIRTY BABY marries music to pictures, pictures to poems, and poems to music,” writes David Breskin of the new work he’s orchestrated that combines Ed Ruscha’s paintings, music by Wilco’s Nels Cline, and his own poems, written in the ghazal form. In an e-mail exchange, Breskin and Cline tease out the threads of this transglobal, interdisciplinary, multimedia experience.

After pop polymath Nick Zammuto ends his current tour at the Walker on November 10, his thoughts will turn from the stage to the definitiveness of winter as he readies his homestead for a season that “gets a little hairy where we are in Vermont.” In a new interview he discusses life after the vaunted experimental duo the Books and how he balances making art and living off the land (and grid).

Amid the clamor of Super PAC–powered politicians duking it out on a whole new level this election season, Laurie Anderson’s Dirtday! offers a timely, quietly powerful rejoinder. An artist who normally steers clear of directly addressing politics in her work, she recently discussed her motivations in applying the “sharp tools” of her art to the topics of peace, politics, and never-ending war.