Starting with the stage name Danielle Ate the Sandwich and extending to her unabashedly silly intros to YouTube videos, her press photos, her jokey stage banter, and her ukulele, Danielle Anderson projects a whimsical image that’s a marked contrast to her voice and her songs.

And while she made that bed to sleep in, she’s not hesitant to say that it irritates her when people don’t take her music seriously. “I hate when people laugh or call my songs ‘cute’ and ‘little’ and ‘funny,’” the Colorado-based singer/songwriter said in a phone interview this week, promoting her June 2 show at Rozz-Tox in Rock Island.

Despite the gimmickry that suggests a novelty act, the 25-year-old Anderson is worth watching. Her third album, last year’s Two Bedroom Apartment, is mature and even startling in its writing and performance.

Blue Grass resident David G. Smith calls himself a “50-something,” and on Saturday he’ll mark the release of his first solo full-length album at the Redstone Room.

It’s undoubtedly a late start, but Smith said in a phone interview this week that he has genetics on his side. Two of his grandparents made it to their mid 90s, and one lived to 105. So by his calculation, “I have a 20-year career ahead of me.”

It’s off to a good start. Non-Fiction is a solid debut for the longtime songwriter – acoustic rock that’s sometimes funky and sometimes gentle, smartly produced and performed with conviction.

David Lowery saw no reason to make a solo album.

For more than 25 years, he’s been recording and releasing music with his bands Camper Van Beethoven and Cracker – a pair of “very diverse and flexible ensembles,” he said in a phone interview last week. “And so usually pretty much any piece of music I write, I can kind of put it with either one of the bands or the other.”

And both bands remain active, regularly touring together since 2002. “I know the Cracker and Camper audiences overlap like 90 percent,” he said. “And it’s just a little artificial sometimes to feel like, ‘Tonight the billboard says Cracker, and we’re only going to play Cracker songs.’”

But in February, at age 50, Lowery released under his own name The Palace Guards, a collection of nine songs that, he has said, gives “a sense of what it is that I’m kind of bringing to the bands.”

It’s little surprise that the members of Ha Ha Tonka, hailing from the Ozarks, have a natural affinity for bluegrass.

“Anything we do, whether we’re trying to cover an R.E.M. song or what have you, comes out sounding Ozark-ian,” said frontman Brian Roberts in a phone interview last week. But on Death of a Decade, released in April, that influence on the band’s indie rock is front-and-center with Brett Anderson’s mandolin.

Roberts said the quartet, which will perform at RIBCO on Friday, aimed for “brighter, more hopeful sounds” on the album. And because Anderson had been playing lots of mandolin, “it just became the starting point for a lot songs. ... It’s such a colorful, I daresay happy-sounding, instrument. It definitely has a bright sound about it that I think ... helped capture the type of vibe or mood that we were wanting on the songs.”

That description misses the tonal and artistic expansiveness of the album. The mandolin drives opening track “Usual Suspects,” and it’s indeed an upbeat rocker. But elsewhere, the instrument brings shading or a counterpoint; on “Lonely Fortunes,” the mandolin adds balance, emotional complexity, and ambiguity simply through its pregnant tone.

Ben Schneider is a visual artist who studied painting, and his music – as Lord Huron – reflects that. It’s not merely the covers for his two EPs – warmly evocative, slightly foggy images that showcase the natural beauty of figures, water, landscape, and light together. The ethereal, tropical songs themselves have their origins in the visual.

Schneider and his four-piece backing band will be coming to RIBCO on May 4, and in a phone interview this week, he described the translation from the visual to the aural.

“When I’m writing songs, I usually try to tell a story ... ,” he said. “A lot of times, the way I’ll start is by getting an image in mind and then try to translate that image ... sonically. ... I just kind of try to make a soundtrack for that image. It’s almost like making a little film in your head, and then making music that will go with it.”