Monte Montgomery. Photo by Jens Christensen.Monte Montgomery's guitar-playing is so distinctive, dexterous, and seemingly ingrained that it sounds like he might have had the instrument in his cradle. So it's surprising that he could have just as easily played the trumpet.

His first instruments were trumpet and piano, and he said he only took the guitar seriously "when I no longer had a piano or a trumpet at my disposal, and my Mom had an extra guitar. That's what I had. I often joke about, 'Mom, what would have happened if we hadn't lost that trumpet?' ... I think fate had other things in store for me."

He's similarly matter-of-fact about his decision to abandon electric guitar for an acoustic. "I could do a lot of things on acoustic I was relying on electric for," he said in a phone interview earlier this week. "So why not leave the extra guitar at home and the additional two heavy amps I was carrying around for my electric, and just play acoustic? It really was kind of just that simple."

The playing by Montgomery, who will be performing at the Redstone Room on November 17, is anything but simple. In 2004, Guitar Player magazine named him one of the 50 greatest guitar players of all time, and he's been called the acoustic Hendrix.

Band of Heathens

The opening track of the Band of Heathens' One Foot in the Ether is classic electric alt-country, but a listener unfamiliar with the Texas quintet would be wise to withhold judgment or expectations. "L.A. County Blues" casually segues into soft harmonies recalling the 1970s in "Say," and then "Shine a Light" digs heavily into soulful, organ-heavy gospel.

That diversity of styles befits a group with three primary songwriters who each play multiple instruments, but it also reflects an understanding of the essential similarities shared by different branches of roots music.

"I've never seen blues music or soul music being very far away from country music or bluegrass," singer/songwriter Ed Jurdi said in a recent phone interview promoting the Band of Heathens' November 4 performance at the Redstone Room. "The approach is slightly different in terms of who's singing the song and what they sound like."

Songwriters Jurdi, Gordy Quist, and Colin Brooks - with bassist Seth Whitney and drummer John Chipman - are celebrating the fifth anniversary of their band this month, yet rather than settling on a sound, Band of Heathens has embraced a stylistic sloppiness.

Lissie. Photo by Valerie Phillips.

(Note: This show was canceled on October 14 and will be rescheduled.)

When Rock Island native Lissie Maurus performed in the Quad Cities in November, she had just released the EP Why You Runnin', and it seemed to promise that more aching folk would follow.

Three of the EP's five songs ("Little Lovin'," "Everywhere I Go," and "Oh Mississippi") made the cut on the full-length Catching a Tiger, but only the first of those - with its escalating, building soul - foreshadowed her album's stunning pop path.

There's no doubt that Lissie is a strong singer, with a throaty voice full of color and conviction and frayed around the edges. But good folk music requires sterling wordplay, and I worried that Maurus might not yet have the songwriting chops to carry a record of lightly adorned songs, even with her considerable pipes.

So Catching a Tiger - released in August - is a major and welcome surprise. A handful of producers and co-writers developed tracks around Maurus' voice, and she takes flight within the dynamic tunes. I heard Cat Power and Neko Case in the spare arrangement of her EP, but Catching a Tiger finds her in the smartly fleshed-out company of Tori Amos and Fiona Apple; the aural richness augments and supports fundamentally strong material.

Dick PrallIt's been more than two years since Dick Prall released his last studio album, Weightless, and while that's a typical gap in the music business, the Iowa-raised, Chicago-based singer/songwriter doesn't believe it works for independent artists generally, and him particularly.

"For me, it's kind of daunting to say, 'Okay, this is what I've done the last two years, here you go, and let's see if that carries for the next two years,'" he said in a recent interview to promote his September 9 solo-acoustic show at the Redstone Room. (He'll also be recording a Daytrotter.com session that day.)

The problem, he said, is that schedule forces a musician to re-build momentum with each album. So he's determined to stop fizzling between releases. He's prepping an EP for this fall, with another to follow in late winter.

In this new age of singles (and single-track purchasing), the EP looks to Prall like an ideal format.

Lois Deloatch"If you're gonna tell it, tell the truth and tell it all!" was an adage I heard often as a child growing up in rural North Carolina, where hard work, honesty, and generosity anchored our deep, abiding family and community values. Entering adulthood, I learned that living this seemingly simple conviction is much more complicated than the phase itself appears. "If you're gonna tell it" implies that you've made a choice, a conscious decision to speak truth, while "tell the truth" suggests that you have knowledge or understanding of what the truth is, that you know right from wrong and fact from fiction. Finally, "tell it all" reveals that the truth cannot be selective, and you cannot conveniently or deliberately omit facts or tell part of the story. When my siblings and I sometimes landed in trouble, as children often do, my mother admonished, "I don't care what you've done or how bad it seems, I need you to tell me the truth. I can deal with the truth, but there is nothing I can do with a lie!"

Mat Kearney. Photo by James Minchin.

Mat Kearney's July 14 show at the Redstone Room will feature the singer/songwriter and his guitar. That's a departure for somebody with his adult-contemporary credentials: two major-label albums, music appearing in roughly 20 television shows, four Billboard top-20 Hot Adult hits, and tours with John Mayer, Sheryl Crow, Jason Mraz, and Train, among others.

"I love playing with a band and production, and I would love to be in arenas ... flying through the crowd with Garth Brooks wings on or something," he said in a recent phone interview. But "after all the lights and band and buses, it was time for me to get back in the van with some friends and see where the wind blew us, remove a lot of the pressure and a lot of the schedule and just be able to roll into town and play the songs we wanted and head on to the next town. ... I can stop for as long as I want, I can talk for as long as I want, I can play whatever I want. There's just a lot more freedom for me to connect with people."

Danika HolmesThe typical aspiring singer/songwriter gets started by playing hometown open-mic nights. Danika Holmes is not typical.

The 27-year-old Davenport resident said in a recent interview that her mother regularly told her, "I always knew you weren't normal, Danika." Holmes added: "I'm not exactly sure how to take that coming from my Mom, but I'll take it as a good thing."

In terms of her music, being abnormal meant making her public debut last year at an audition for Nashville's Bluebird Cafe, at which Garth Brooks and Taylor Swift got their starts.

"I have big dreams," Holmes explained. "I have big goals. ... I wanted to get where all the action is immediately. ... As a songwriter, if you can make it into the Bluebird Cafe, you've really accomplished something great."

Jesse Malin

Over the past few years, Jesse Malin found himself displaced, although not exactly because of the economy.

Now 42, Malin has lived in the (literal) spotlight since he was 13, fronting the hardcore band Heart Attack in the early 1980s and then the glam band D Generation throughout the '90s before going solo. It might have been a midlife crisis, but after three well-received solo albums and seven years of touring behind them, Malin wasn't sure that music was his proper path, he said.

"Somehow, after the third record, I found myself doing a covers record [in 2008], and then going off on some weird tours in the States, and back in New York, and I was kind of confused what the next thing to do was," he said in a phone interview last week. "I was laying around, I was trying to think what else I could do for a living."

Some of this was undoubtedly financial. Although he's been in music for nearly three decades, it's been an album-to-album existence. "I found myself living on my sister's couch, hanging out back down at the Bowery, DJ-ing at a club, taking the bus with old ladies," he said. "Where's this money coming from? The covers record really didn't pay much publishing, because I didn't write on it. I was just starving for something. ... I'm broke, and I've got nothing else to say. What else can I do?"

Malin has found his way back to music -- his vital Love It to Life album with his new band the St. Marks Social will be released April 27, and he'll be performing at the Redstone Room on April 22 -- but over two years he experimented outside of music. He tried his hand at stand-up comedy, DJ-ed some weddings in Las Vegas, conducted interviews for a documentary on Bad Brains, and supervised music for a documentary on the legendary club CBGB. (There's also an unreleased album by ATM, featuring Malin, pal Ryan Adams, and Johnny T. Yerington, who previously, collectively, somewhat secretly released a punk record as The Finger.)

Miles NielsenWhen his band Harmony Riley called it quits in 2004, Miles Nielsen took a yearlong break from songwriting. "I couldn't write anything because I didn't know what I was about," he said in a phone interview last week. "A huge part of my life just ended. I sort of looked at it a little bit like, 'Okay, we sort of failed at the music thing.' I was really trying to figure out what to do. And then once I realized that was all sort of not the case ... it made me focus on writing again."

Nielsen's sense of failure is understandable if misguided: His father is Cheap Trick's Rick Nielsen, and when that's the standard by which you judge yourself ... .

ReganOn the song "Superstar," Regan sings that "I'll pay the price for fame / I'll even change my name" and "I've worked really hard and I've paid my dues."

Regan performs using her middle name, so that's already done. But the senior at Bettendorf's Pleasant Valley High School is (and sounds) 18 years old, which is too young to have paid many dues in the music industry.

Yet the biggest irony is that Regan -- who will perform at the Redstone Room on March 11 -- has had a charmed path in her burgeoning music career. She was selected -- based on songs on her MySpace page -- for the Crash Course to Stardom program in which she spent a week in Los Angeles learning the ropes of the music business; that's the kind of experience and advice that most singers would kill for at the start of their careers. Her debut EP was shaped by established producers and has songs with the hooks and attention to musical detail that would sound right at home on mainstream country or pop radio.

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