Van McCann, singer and guitarist for the United Kingdom's Catfish & the Bottlemen, has a strange relationship with the song "Homesick."

"I thought it was the worst one of the batch we did ... when we first started recording for Communion," he said, referring to the label/tour founded by Mumford & Sons' Ben Lovett. "Since then, it's become my favorite."

What changed, McCann said, was that other people liked it. And therein lies a great deal of the charm of Catfish & the Bottlemen, a band described by the UK's The Guardian as "deeply old-fashioned - and unfashionable."

McCann doesn't disagree with that assessment - whether it means an indifference toward appearance or, in a larger sense, a band more in love with the idea of playing for as many people as possible than selling lots of records or making artistic statements. When the quartet performs a Communion/Daytrotter show at Maquoketa's Codfish Hollow Barn on June 19, expect no-frills rock-and-roll with one goal: to connect with the audience.

The Weeks. Photo by Emily B. Hall.

The title of The Weeks' Dear Bo Jackson does more than name-check the famous two-sport professional athlete - an All-Pro running back in the NFL and an All-Star outfielder in Major League Baseball. It also articulates a mission statement for the Nashville-by-way-of-Mississippi band.

"Bo Jackson, as good as he was at baseball and football, he was just called a ballplayer," said guitarist Sam Williams earlier this week. "Bo Jackson just kind of does what he wants. That's sort of what we were going with, musically. ... I just want to be a rock band. ... I think this record has a lot of different genres. We kind of skip around a lot."

To extend the metaphor, Williams said "the bashing rock-and-roll songs" represent The Weeks' football career, while the slower songs are baseball. "They take a little longer to develop," he said, but they have their share of "triples and homes runs."

Of course, bands hate being pigeonholed, but The Weeks make good on their chutzpah. When the latest edition of the Communion tour hits the Quad Cities on January 23 (at RIBCO), the bill features a pair of throwback bands. Both The Weeks and The Dough Rollers play rock that neither needs nor warrants additional modifiers; it's music largely out of time.

Willy Mason

An online comment on the American Songwriter review of Willy Mason's Carry on disputed the gushing praise heaped on the album, complaining that "the percussion sounds to me like it's straight from a drum-machine loop."

There's a simple reason for that: It was.

The singer/songwriter will be performing October 17 at Maquoketa's Codfish Hollow Barn as part of the Communion Tour with Rubblebucket, Roadkill Ghost Choir, and others. In a phone interview last week, Mason explained that the drum-machine idea came from producer Dan Carey. "He had that, and I had the songs, and we went in and we started working with that rhythm, and things just unfolded from there pretty quickly," he said. "I was actually skeptical at first, but I thought it would be worth a try. ...

David Mayfield.A lot of bands decide to track their albums largely live in the studio, but until I talked to David Mayfield, I'd never heard such a strong rationale. The typical goal (outside of saving money and time) is to capture a live energy, with the incidental benefit of retaining some charming flubs.

But for the self-titled debut of the David Mayfield Parade, this bandleader knew that live tracking - including recording the drums with a single microphone - would get the best out of the players.

"I think there's some merit to limiting your options," said Mayfield, whose band will perform as part of the Communion Tour at Rock Island's Rozz-Tox on November 1. "It really helped to just put us in a mindset of pulling the trigger and making these choices early on. All the lead guitar, and drums, and bass are in the room together, and there's so much bleed that you couldn't go in and fix something. You had to just choose a take and live with it, which kind of made everyone ... more precious about their performance."