Now resigned to "classic rock" status, two of the 1980s' biggest arena-rocking bands are back next week with all-new cover collections. Poison passes - thankfully - on the eyeshadow and puckers up with Poison'd on Capitol Records, featuring eight new sessions and other rarities including a take on the Kiss party anthem "Rock & Roll All Nite," from 1987's Less Than Zero soundtrack. The party-people-pleasing set list features Alice Cooper's "I Never Cry," Tom Petty's "I Need to Know," The Cars' "Just What I Needed," and the Marshall Tucker Band's "Can't You See."

Mark your calendars and beg your local record store to hold you a copy of the June 6 NME magazine, as that week's issue will come with a limited-edition white-wax seven-inch of The White Stripes' new single, "Icky Thump." While the UK retail CD and seven-inch single bear the rare B sides "Catch Hell Blues" and "Baby Brother," respectively, the NME bonus bears an artistic, etched flip side instead of another song.

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."

A country-music performer's decision to move to Nashville is typically the product of a dream. For Suzy Bogguss, it was eminently practical.

In the early 1980s, the Aledo native and Illinois State University graduate was knocking around the country, doing gigs at coffeehouses and ski resorts. She lived in the Quad Cities, Kewanee, Peoria.

She didn't envision a future as a respected and popular country singer. She didn't aspire to the gold and platinum records she would eventually earn.

"It just never really occurred to me that that's what my goal was going to be," she said in a phone interview last week, in advance of her May 12 performance with the Quad City Symphony Orchestra at the Adler Theatre. "It was just fun."