The very act of paring down your favorite albums will always have value. There’s something warm and cozy about imagining those albums existing as discrete milestones in music history, having reached so many ears in their compact form, entertaining outside of the framework of infinite availability and almost too-comfortable omni-selection that streaming has produced. With that in mind, here are my picks.

Accompanied by an entire repertoire of jazz standards and iconic pop hits, a 2005 graduate of Rock Island High School returns to the Quad Cities – performing for live audiences for the first time since March – in The Matt Barber Experience, the July 2 concert event at Davenport's Grape Life Wine Store & Lounge that finds Barber and his touring musicians performing classics from the five albums he has recorded since 2007.

With Maquoketa's Ohnward Fine Arts Center set to re-open by adhering to Iowa's social-distancing guidelines, the venue will officially welcome patrons back on June 27 in the stage celebration Joseph Hall's Elvis Rock 'n' Roll Remember Show, a salute to the King of Rock 'n' Roll led by one of the United States' most lauded tribute artists and a former competitor on America's Got Talent.

In a sea of carbon-copied hits that sound like they were genetically engineered in a lab, alchemized into being with the same few ingredients and signifiers that topped the charts a couple weeks before, the best pop music to emerge from any given era stands out by surveying recent musical trends and streaking off in the completely opposite direction. More than a process of picking a sub-genre no one has heard in five years or so and hopping into it just for the sake of a novel juxtaposition, to shock fans for a moment before they keep scrolling down the feed, the artists who succeed at bucking trends and emerging with something unique do so by embracing the weirder or potentially more “uncool” aspects of their own musical interests.