“If I had not been in a school music program, I would never have been elected president,” Bill Clinton said Tuesday. “It taught me discipline and order. It made me listen better. And once I got into jazz, I realized you had to make some things up along the way…”

Bucking band-culture expectations, the Lisps have added a nontraditional project to their recording and touring schedule: making a musical. The band prioritizes spectacle over, say, shoegazing, but their work FUTURITY is still “a musical made by people who don’t make musicals.” The group’s Sammy Tunis and César Alvarez weigh in on why they chose this form and how it kept their band together.

With their new album, Mali’s Amadou & Mariam, the blind husband-and-wife duo, reach out to new audiences, with help from guest artists including Santigold and TV on the Radio’s Kyp Malone and Tunde Adebimpe. They play the Cedar Aug. 7.

The Met’s 2012-2013 season has a twist: Its first ever performing artist in residence will be Paul D. Miller, aka DJ Spooky, who over the course of a year will perform five times (including a participatory iPad piece), host talks, and more.

After being disqualified from his own presidential run, singer Youssou Ndour finds himself in politics nonetheless: He’s been named Senegal’s new minister for culture and tourism. The Grammy winner is part of new president Macky Sall’s cabinet.

Dubbed the “Lord of Loud,” the inventor of the ubiquitous Marshall guitar amplifier, Jim Marshall, has died at the age of 88. The “Marshall stack,” first created at the request of The Who’s Pete Townshend, became a defining feature of modern rock ‘n’ roll.

Andrew Bird, Laurie Anderson, and Amadou & Mariam are among artists invited to perform in A Room For London, a small “boat” overlooking the Thames. Winning a design contest, Fiona Banner’s proposal is based on the boat Joseph Conrad captained in the Congo in 1890.