For Sam Beam, the impressively bearded man behind Iron & Wine, the transition from the spare, intimate folk that made his name in alternative-music circles to playful, lushly fleshed-out songs with an African flair was not something that gave him pause.

"It would just be kind of lame to do the same record over and over again, don't you think?" he said in a phone interview last week. "I can get bored real fast, to be honest."

The first thing you're likely to notice about Keith Lynch's voice is that it often sounds like Kurt Cobain's.

Such comparisons are typically lazy and superficial, as this one is. But the Iowa City-based singer/songwriter - who records under the name Unknown Component and will be performing at Mojo's on Thursday - taps into something genuine with that flat whine, and the resemblance is eerie.

The Quad Cities will host the Upper Mississippi River Conference and RiverWay 2008 late this summer. The conference, which will take place August 21 through 23, will include three keynote speakers talking about ways to connect people with the river and how to enhance wildlife habitats. Although the event at the i wireless Center in Moline is geared toward city officials, architects, environmentalists, and teachers, it will provide a variety of activities for the general public. The conference partnered with River Action, which is producing RiverWay 2008, to offer events such as night bike rides, lock and dam tours, and canoing lessons. More information is available at (http://www.riveraction.org). - Marguerite Day

Copyright law is arcane enough, but a debate bubbling in Congress and among artists, libraries, and museums is important despite its obscurity.

The issue is "orphan works" - writing, photographs, paintings, and music whose copyright-holders are difficult (or impossible) to locate or contact.

Corynne McSherry, staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said the result is that a library or museum will not make the material available to the public because of the potential penalty of statutory damages - which have a ceiling of $150,000 per copyrighted item.

A museum is "worried that it might get sued," McSherry said. "So the material stays locked away."