Last year, Quad Cities-based singer/songwriter Lewis Knudsen decided to give up substitute-teaching to devote himself full-time to music. Lots of musicians make a similar leap, but few of them commit to it as fearlessly and smartly as Knudsen has.

He performed at open mics and got gigs wherever he could - restaurants, bars, wineries, nursing homes, birthday parties, company parties.

He set out to write and record a new song a week in 2013, a project that ended up generating 40 tracks (all of them available on his Web site at LewisKnudsen.com/songs-from-2013). For the uncharitable who think Knudsen was a slacker for falling short of his goal, the song-a-week project was waylaid by a three-week tour of Europe through the Germany-based Songs & Whispers organization.

He assembled a band and professionally recorded the self-released album Joy, Pain, Love, Songs. - whose debut he'll be marking with a June 5 show at the Redstone Room.

And while studio recording can be a challenge for neophytes, Knudsen sidestepped that issue in two ways - by fine-tuning the songs in live settings and having the process come to him by tracking with mobile equipment in his quintet's practice space. "It was exactly like being in my living room and recording the whole album," Knudsen said in a phone interview last week.

David G. Smith. Photo by Avory Pierce.In putting together his new album One House, Blue Grass, Iowa-based David G. Smith "ended up with 10 issues-oriented songs," he said in an interview last week.

This was a bit of an accident. Smith - who will be celebrating the album's release with a May 17 show at the Redstone Room - said he brought 21 songs to producer Blue Miller and "figured we'd find an album out of that. ... We ended up recording two albums. ... We've got another one on deck. It's already been mastered."

And when Smith considered which songs to put on which album, One House's 10 tracks seemed to naturally go together in the order they appear.

The title track asks the question "Can we live in one house built on higher ground?" "Ivory" deals with the illegal trade of elephant tusks. "Jesus Is in Prison" is about a death-row inmate. "Angels Flew" tells the story of a boat lift rescuing people on 9/11. "Doesn't Take Much Light" and "Ariel" are specific narratives based on real people - with Parkinson's disease and the extremely rare Rett syndrome, respectively. (The River Music Experience concert is also a platform to raise money for the latter illness.)

It's a heavy collection, and for some tastes it will likely be too on-the-nose, even though it's rarely preachy - which Smith called "the mortal sin of songwriting": "It's a supreme challenge to try to write something that will strike a chord with people and at least make them pause and maybe think a little bit."

The subject matter and directness are countered by folk arrangements that are thoughtful and evocative, but more importantly the album - Smith's second studio effort - is also filled with hope, conviction, earnest heart, and lovely turns of phrase that elevate it. Smith is at his best finding unexpected light in the darkness.

Chuck Ragan. Photo by Tom Stone.

When Chuck Ragan stops in Davenport later this month, his fans shouldn't miss the opportunity to see him. He's not likely to announce his retirement from touring any time soon, but he's regularly talked about the difficulties of being a touring musician and the price that families pay.

And he said in a phone interview last week that someday he will hang up his guitar to spend more time with his family. "Absolutely," he said. "I'm sure a lot of musicians would say the exact opposite. ... [But] I really look forward to that in a huge way. And I don't know when that is. ... I've always had a love/hate relationship with touring and the road. It does take a massive toll. But I think it takes more of a toll on our loved ones, who are on the other side of it."

Ragan is not, I stress, stepping out of the spotlight soon - which should be apparent from both his recent activity and his plans.

The Portland Cello Project. Photo by Tarina Westlund.

For its June 27 performance at the Redstone Room, the Portland Cello Project will be featuring the music of Beck (Hanson), (Dave) Brubeck, and (Johann Sebastian) Bach. Alliteration aside, the grouping of a contemporary rock artist, a jazz icon, and a Baroque composer is relatively natural for an ensemble known for aggressively omnivorous appetites.

"It really started with the Beck," said Doug Jenkins, the Portland Cello Project's artistic director, in a recent phone interview. "When we heard last August that he was going to put out an album of sheet music rather than actually recording an album, we got really excited, because it just seemed like it was right up our alley - to grab that and play with it and adapt it to our larger orchestral ensemble. And so we booked the show immediately. ... It was coming out December 7, so we booked the shows on December 13 [and] 14 - even having no idea what we were going to get. ... We got the music, and we basically camped out 24/7 to learn all 20 songs and get them all ready to go for the performances. ... They're wonderful songs. ... We recorded them right away, too, a week later, and then put out that CD.

"That was a month or two after Dave Brubeck passed away. [He actually died December 5.] We did kind of a tribute to Dave Brubeck at the same time. And Brubeck and Beck, they actually went together really well. The kind of old-timey feel of the Beck songs from the Song Reader, and of course Brubeck is just wonderful, timeless stuff. ... And then the Bach just seemed like, as a cellist, a logical thing to throw onto it."

Brubeck channeled Bach in his "Brandenburg Gate," and one instrumental piece from Song Reader has a classical vibe, Jenkins said. So "there's already this reaching among the composers who obviously had no idea what we were ever going to do with it. We can find a lot of middle ground, a lot of places to connect things together."

The Trishas

The members of the band that became the Trishas - playing June 6 at the Redstone Room - knew almost immediately that they had something special. But it took some prodding for them to pursue it.

The country quartet - Jamie Wilson, Liz Foster, Kelley Mickwee, and Savannah Welch - was assembled to perform at a 2009 tribute to country singer/songwriter Kevin Welch, Savannah's father. Foster explained in a recent phone interview that Savannah was hesitant to participate but willing to as part of a larger group. The women weren't friends - most of them knew one of the others, Foster said - so their initial rehearsal was their first time spending any time together.

"You can put four people together and have them all sing the right harmony notes, but it still doesn't blend," Foster said. "You have to really learn each other's voices to really click right."

But during that first rehearsal, on "Satan's Paradise" (written by Kevin Welch and Claudia Scott), the clicking was evident. "We just hit the note, and it was ridiculous," she said. "Of course, we're girls, so we're all jumping around, screaming."

Victor Wooten. Photo by Steven Parke.

The best teachers inspire as much as they instruct, and Victor Wooten both understands and practices that.

His chops as a performing artist are unquestionable. He won five Grammys with Béla Fleck & the Flecktones - of which he's a founding member - and three times was named "best bassist" by the readers of Bass Player magazine. Rolling Stone readers in 2011 voted him the 10th best bass player of all time - alongside icons from the Beatles, Cream, Led Zeppelin, Metallica, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Rush, and the Who.

Beyond being an accomplished musician, for the past 14 years he's run music camps for kids, now held at the 147-acre Wooten Woods Retreat in Tennessee. And on April 21, as part of Polyrhythms' Third Sunday jazz series, Wooten will give both a workshop and a concert at the Redstone Room.

He will not teach how to play bass like he does. As he said of The Music Lesson, his fictional work-around to a much-requested instruction manual: "I didn't really want to put out a Victor Wooten method. I don't want to tell people how they have to play."

What Wooten excels at, as a phone interview last week illustrates, is gently knocking down the walls that keep creativity and music bottled up. He said he chose to tell a story in his book instead of writing an instruction manual because it freed him to explore his ideas and philosophy without being tied to facts or technique: "It lets me off the hook right away. ... 'This isn't true.' ... That format allowed me to put more into the book - even things that I can't prove."

The Kopecky Family Band. Photo by Will Morgan Holland.

The second track on the debut album by the Kopecky Family Band is the mid-tempo number "Heartbeat," pleasant but unremarkable until the two-tiered bridge, which ultimately explodes with what sounds like a theremin.

It's actually co-founder Gabe Simon whistling, multitracked and treated with reverb, and those 15 seconds demonstrate a maximalist tendency - understandable for a six-person band with members who play several instruments. The album starts with horns and cello, for instance, before the guitar rock kicks in, and the record employs an expansive sonic palette.

But the key thing about that whistling is that it's right, the perfect touch at the perfect moment. Beyond the typical mix of loud and quiet songs, the Kopecky Family Band on the vibrantly dynamic Kids Raising Kids (out April 2 on ATO Records) has a judiciously sharp sense of how much or little songs require; adventurousness is tempered by discipline.

"Change" is acoustic guitar, some ethereal atmospherics, and vocals - anchored by the inherently poignant singing of Kelsey Kopecky. Straightforward opener "Wandering Eyes" has a swagger bordering on stalker menace. "Are You Listening?" finds Simon whistling again, but in a conventionally tuneful way.

"That's the dynamic of the record: to get that simple or to get as a big as a song like 'Hope' - multiple layers, tons of strings, tons of keyboards ... ," Simon said. "There have to be those moments when you say, 'Does it need everything? ... Can this song survive just by itself? Or does the song need these layers to build it into something great, ... memorable?' That's what I think is cool about the record: It has both of those things. That's what six people allows to happen."

(Editor's note: This concert was canceled on June 13.)

Richard Lloyd. Photo by Brian Jenkins.What's essential to know about the Redstone Room's June 14 headliner can be summed up succinctly: Richard Lloyd was one of the guitarists of Television, the seminal band whose 1977 Marquee Moon is widely considered a great debut, an unmistakable influence on post-punk and alternative rock, and a classic, period.

The All Music Guide calls it "a revolutionary album, but it's a subtle, understated revolution. Without question, it is a guitar-rock album - it's astonishing to hear the interplay between [singer/songwriter/guitarist] Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd - but it is a guitar-rock album unlike any other," composed entirely of "tense garage rockers that spiral into heady intellectual territory, which is achieved through the group's long, interweaving instrumental sections ... ."

But to reduce Lloyd to a member of Television - whose initial incarnation disbanded in 1978 after two sterling studio albums - is to diminish a more-than-respectable career as a performer and songwriter outside of that band, and to rob the world of a fascinating person.

Ragaman

My first listens to And Other Anagrams, the full-length debut of the Quad Cities trio Ragaman, brought to mind something Andrew Bird said to me in a 2007 interview: "I don't know what a bass line is supposed to do." The context was finding collaborators who didn't play "stock footage," who fight pop formulas in the creation of pop music.

Bird and Ragaman share an endearing softness and a natural aversion to subjugating intelligence, and both seem constitutionally incapable of conventional approaches, from instrumentation to style to structure. Ragaman employs the sitar as the lead on "Everyone You Know," for example, and it's the perfect essential detail: Taking the traditional rock role of the electric guitar, the instrument is comfortable yet foreign, and its chattiness anchors the song. The break of "Ankle Bells" features what sound like kazoos and trumpets - although I suspect some of that is mouth-mimicry.

Singer/songwriter/guitarist Lars Rehnberg, bassist/engineer Gordon Pickering, and percussionist Leif Rehnberg make up Ragaman - an anagram of "anagram," a joke referenced in the album's title. Their style is a pop stew with distinct flavors - jazz, funk, and world music intermingle and take turns dominating. But it's unified enough by its ambition, its breezy texture, and the vocals and playing of Lars Rehnberg - a former co-worker at the River Cities' Reader.

The Minnesota-based Finnish-American instrumental folk duo Kaivama - performing at the River Music Experience on March 10 - has been around for less than two years, and multi-instrumentalist Jonathan Rundman acknowledges that "the whole band has kind of happened in reverse. We got a gig before we existed as a group. So we had to form the band in order to play the gig."

And its self-titled debut album came out less than a year after the group's genesis - before it had even toured.

Rundman attributes this to demand. The Finnish-American population, he said in a phone interview last month, is small but active, and that audience frankly doesn't have many options when it comes to traditional music from its ancestral home."It's a niche," he said. "We're some of the only choices they have as far as that goes.

"But apart from the demographics, I think it's because Nordic music is really beautiful. I don't say that because we're such a great band; I say that because ... it's just beautiful music. ... It's just undeniably gorgeous music. ... The raw material is wonderful."

He's right, but also too modest. With roughly the same number of traditional tunes and originals, Kaivama is expertly poised between the old and new - aged melodies adorned by modern flourishes. A warm, jaunty keyboard, for example, matches Sara Pajunen's coolly nimble fiddle on opening track "Schottische 150."

Pages