Laura Stevenson's song "Sink, Swim" could be called an apocalyptic ditty, a cheery, up-tempo rock song with soaring vocals that sketches out the destruction of the West Coast: "Oh California, I tried to warn ya. / The earth is gonna quake before ya. / You'll be real sorry but it won't be sorry. / The dirt is gonna crack and split you in two." The casual address certainly suggests the musical approach, but it's easy to miss the lyrics in such a joyous ruckus.

The song appears on her 2013 album Wheel, and she explained in a phone interview last week that "I like that juxtaposition of mood and ... undercurrent - the actual meaning of the song. ... Two different ways of feeling the same word[s]. You can read them on the page and take them at face value, or you could hear them put to music with a completely different mood. It's just a different way of digesting it. Kind of what life is like."

She and her band will be playing the Moline Bier Stube on October 4, and in that setting it will be easy to gloss over grim words. But Stevenson's songs are rewarding both musically and lyrically, whether you consider their sometimes disparate components together or separately.

In February, the Quad City Symphony contacted a representative of Michael Torke with the hope of commissioning a short season-opening piece from the well-known American composer. It was a long shot - a request with a turnaround time of a few months instead of the typical year or two between commissioning and the orchestra's first rehearsal with the completed music.

But Torke was looking for a summer project, a short work to add to his library of titles. "I love those drop-everything-now projects," Torke said in a phone interview in July. "The Quad City thing seemed perfect." With the logistics in place, what remained was finding an appropriate artistic concept and completing the piece before rehearsals in September.

Oracle was composed in a burst of creative energy from mid-June to mid-July. "I think this is going to be one of the best pieces I've ever written," Torke predicted the day after the five-minute composition was completed. "I am so jazzed up about it. It starts off with this kind of 'Pines of Rome' thing, with one variation of the melody warm and juicy, and another noble."

There are people who work in an office and dream of stardom. And then there's Creed Bratton, who actually achieved stardom, and then went on to work in an office.

Of course, given that he wound up in the office of the Scranton, Pennsylvania-based paper-supply company Dunder Mifflin, this could hardly be considered a career demotion.

Photos by Anthony Patrizi from RIBCO's outdoor William Elliott Whitmore concert on August 30, 2013.