Parlophone - the label home to everyone from the Beatles to Colplay in the UK - found the Swedish quintet Love Is All a touch hard to work with.

The label released the band's 2006 debut, Nine Times That Same Song, but dropped it after receiving rough mixes for the follow-up and getting resistance from the group about employing some outside producers to shape the recordings.

It was a union destined for failure, but Parlophone simply discovered what the members of Love Is All knew already: They are difficult.

"Everybody has so much say about everything," said lead singer Josephine Olausson in a phone interview last week. "It can get really frustrating."

The Quad Cities quartet Chrash goes by many names, and right now its preference appears to be Chrash Flood. That shape-shifting seems to reflect an almost willful desire for obscurity.

It's also a fair summary of Chrash's appropriately titled new record, The Name They Change, which the band will celebrate Saturday night at RIBCO.

Ask Polyrhythms' Nate Lawrence about the highlights of more than two years presenting the Third Sunday jazz series at the River Music Experience, and his response tells you a great deal about his goals.

"Lenora Helm put together a choir real quick, out of the kids, and they're doing 'Ain't Misbehavin','" he recalled last week. "Ray Blue, he had a six-piece with percussionists and whatnot, and as soon as the workshop was over, the kids just bum-rushed the stage. They sat at the piano. Some of the kids just grabbed the mic and started singing. Some kids went to the congas and started playing. The drummer got up, the kids sat down. It's hands-on. Those are the high points."

Carrie Rodriguez has always gravitated toward the spotlight, even if it's taken a while to get there.

"My mother said that when I was in Montessori school, they would put on these plays," she recalled in a phone interview last week. "And I would always have the part of the tree or the plant or something. And my mom asked the teacher, 'Why do you keep giving Carrie the role of the tree?' And the Montessori-school teacher says, 'Because no matter what I do, Carrie's going to end up on the front of the stage, singing and dancing, so I can afford to give her the tree role. I need to give the shy kids the main roles.'"