Most bands dubbed "Americana" focus on a thin slice of roots music, but the Nashville-based outfit Buffalo Clover lays claim to a wide swath, all with a smart pop sensibility.

The band's official biography says its styles range from "underdog gypsy punk to Motown boxcar blues, [and] vaudevillian acid rock to train-wreck folk," and those labels are accurate both in terms of genre and vivid, mature execution. On any given night, Buffalo Clover might cover James Brown, Etta James, or Neil Young, and that also offers some sense of what appears to be a nearly boundless comfort zone.

The band - which performed at last year's River Roots Live festival - will play the Redstone Room on February 26 and features two members from the Quad Cities area: singer/songwriter Margo Price (an Aledo, Illinois, native) and guitarist/banjoist Matt Gardner (who went to high school in Bettendorf).

That local connection is one reason to check out the emerging band, but Buffalo Clover has the goods, too. Pick Your Poison, the band's 2010 release, demonstrates its expansive grasp in the span of three songs.

Images by Quad Cities event photographer Chris Jones from February 1's Avenged Sevenfold concert at the i wireless Center, with opener Stone Sour. Click on any photo for a larger version.

For more of Jones' work, visit MusicRowPhotos.com.

Avenged Sevenfold:

On his 2007 solo debut, Down the Road, Ernie Hendrickson tried to make everything perfect.

"Literally, by the time I was finished with that record, I was familiar with every single note on every single song," the Chicago-based Hendrickson said in a phone interview this week.

But the unintended consequence of sweating over every element of the album was that it became something he could never replicate in front of an audience. "If you listen to that record closely ... you can really sort of hear how it would be impossible for people to play what goes on those songs in a live setting," he said.

And not being able to reproduce a song in a concert is a refusal to acknowledge a critical aspect of a musician's life. (For an emerging roots singer/songwriter such as Hendrickson, it's actually a refusal to acknowledge the main source of his livelihood: shows.) "A song is a song," he said, "and it still has to be performed."

Hendrickson will play a show January 21 at the Redstone Room, where his shift in thinking should be clear. He used to bring a looper to his solo shows - trying to build as full a sound as possible, but often at the expense of a connection with the audience. "You're up there and you're getting a lot of blank stares if you don't engage an audience," he said.

When I interviewed Alan Sparhawk in 2007, the singer/songwriter/guitarist touched on the idea of a "golden moment ... when you're sort of just struggling with some instrument and you sort of have just figured it out, and you are just figuring out the first possible ideas and melodies on it; it's really exciting."

He was talking specifically about Low's Drums & Guns, in which the Minnesota trio (featuring Sparhawk, his wife Mimi Parker on drums, and bassist Matt Livingston - who has since left the band) experimented with instruments they weren't comfortable playing.

In an interview last week promoting Retribution Gospel Choir's December 31 performance at RIBCO (supporting the Meat Puppets), that concept re-emerged in slightly different form. He cast it as freedom - but it's critical to understand that it isn't a natural state of being but the result of work and getting rid of ego. "Those are everything," he said. "'There was a moment where I was not in the way.'"