With the band's album debut Poor Pretender hailed by The Creek as "a hushed record rife with departures and narratives that beg remembrance of broken relationships before the memories slip away," the Milwaukee-based Americana, alt-country, and indie-folk musicians of Long Mama headline a September 26 concert at Davenport's Raccoon Motel, The Creek adding that Poor Pretender's songs are "desolate enough to mirror the gray days and long nights (of winter), but undergirded with enough dots of hope that assure us spring is inevitable."

Touring in support of his 2024 album Our Other History, a recording that fellow singer/songwriter Will Oldham called "as rewarding a listening experience as I’ve come across in recent times," genre-hopping indie artist Ned Collette performs a September 20 headlining engagement at Rock Island's Rozz-Tox venue, the artist inspiring Raven Sings the Blues to rave that "Collette captures our imagination, building worlds of sound around the listener in the longform."

With the goal of the evening's guest the creation of a rich environment in which emergent behavior can occur without a preconceived outcome, visual artist Leo Villareal takes part in a September 19 artist talk at Davenport's Figge Art Museum, this fascinating and thought-provoking discussion held in conjunction with the September 21 opening of the artist's new Figge exhibition Interstellar.

Inspired by Carl Sandburg’s poem of the same name, Lisa Nelson Raabe's Prayers of Steel serves as the first art exhibition of the 2024-25 academic year at Galesburg's Carl Sandburg College, its display in the Lonnie Eugene Stewart Art Gallery through October 18 treating patrons to the talents of the Peoria-based artist who has enjoyed solo exhibitions in locales including San Antonio, Chicago, Peoria, Decatur, and Quincy.