One reviewer has called Sky Blue Sky the best Eagles record the Eagles didn't make, and it's impossible to shake the timeless soft-rock vibe in the sound, the vocals, and the easy pace.

"A Ghost Is Born was to me really jagged ... abrasive," Stirratt said of his band's last studio album. "And this record has a certain warmth."

But while Sky Blue Sky at first sounds like a retreat for the band that embraced noise and electronics on Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and A Ghost Is Born, Wilco hasn't abandoned experimentation. "Side with the Seeds" features guitar and Mellotron detours that, combined with slightly muffled drums and throbbing bass spikes, recalls King Crimson's disparate In the Court of the Crimson King and Red.

An unscientific survey of River Cities' Reader employees revealed that many people have never heard of Richard Thompson.

The lack of recognition is not exactly a surprise, because Thompson has never been able to parlay intense respect into sales. But he is an important artist, and one who has no difficulty bridging the gap between folk music and hard-edged rock. He also has a fantastic sense of humor, a rarity among "serious" artists.

So allow me to introduce him.

When I put the album from the electronic duo EOTO in a CD player at work, my office mate Mike Schulz asked - after about five seconds of music - "You're not watching porn, are you?"

I'm guessing that question would please Jason Hann, a percussionist with jam-band/bluegrass favorites String Cheese Incident and half of EOTO. While he's more than happy to talk about the impressive technical elements of the live-looping project - which will be performing at the Redstone Room on Monday, May 28 - he'd rather you just dance.

Most everybody knows that Blur song as "Woo Hoo," even though its proper title is "Song 2." Neither is particularly meaningful.

But Kyle Ferguson, a senior philosophy major at Augustana College, called one of his songs "Notes from a Solipsist," and that title frames the song's lyrics. Solipsism is a belief that one can only know what one directly experiences - that there might not be a world outside of your own mind.

"You identify your experience with the world," Ferguson explained. "So there's no reality external to your experience."