Music

With the shoegaze band Slowdive, the country-rock group Mojave 3 and his own solo albums, Neil Halstead has carved out a 25-year career just outside the pop mainstream. When he was only 17, Halstead helped start Slowdive, which morphed into Mojave 3, which then released a string of highly celebrated albums that merge jangly alt-country with dusky indie-pop.

Autumn Leaves edition.

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Pablo Helguera is a New York-based artist working with sculpture, drawing, photography and performance. You can see more of his work at Artworld Salon and on his own site.

WDIY Classics is an enticing exploration of music from the Baroque to the contemporary with interviews, concert listings, themed shows and more. This week, host Waldemar Vinovskis joins Diane Wittry, with Mark O'Connor and Kelly Hall-Tompkins to preview the "Americana" concerts at Allentown Symphony Hall, Nov. 10 & 11.

• Elegies poured in this week for composer Elliott Carter, who died Monday, a month shy of his 104th birthday. My colleague Tom Cole: "He saw his music go from derision to international acclaim.

There's a special place in my heart for sad bastards who howl through crushingly loud amp stacks. Dinosaur Jr, Hüsker Dü and Warning, for example, all offer opportunities to stare weepily out the window while subtly banging your head. But not enough heavy bands seeking the musical equivalent of failure-through-distortion follow the hung-head example of the Athens, Ga., trio Harvey Milk.

Taylor Swift's new album, Red, sold more 1.2 million copies in its first week — the highest first-week sales total for an album in over a decade. She did it partly by answering a surprisingly complicated question: What's the best way to sell an album?

There are so many ways to release your music these days. You can sell it at Amazon, iTunes, Wal-Mart, and Starbucks. You can release it to streaming sites like Spotify. You can go on tour.