“There is somebody called Lizzo that I hear about,” he said during a recent Zoom interview. “And she’s probably a much better flute player than I am, having been classically trained.”

They’ve gone in and out of style too many times to count, but Tull remains as individual as ever. Their latest album “RokFlote” is the best – and probably only – concept album about Norse mythology you’ll hear this year. But then, not many people were making albums about organized religion in 1971, when Tull released the now-classic ”Aqualung.” Both albums will likely be represented when the band hits the MGM Grand on Saturday.

“Norse mythology originally struck me as a very bad jumping off point for a Jethro Tull record,” he says. “The challenge was to find a way to do it. I had to adopt a light touch in the writing and not give the connotations of a master race, since the poor old Vikings died out several hundred years ago. I tried to give each song a couple stanzas of descriptive writing, followed by a couple that find parallels with human characters that I might know from my associations over the years. What’s interesting about the characters of Norse gods is that they’re not depicted as spiritual magical beings, but as superior humans.”

The most popular Tull albums are usually his own favorites, he says. “I’d say that ‘Stand Up” was one of the best, the ‘Aqualung’ album had some important songs on it, then up to the ‘80s with ‘Crest of a Knave’. A lot of people don’t go beyond the ‘80s, since they stopped listening to Jethro Tull when it became less fashionable. When you do a new album you don’t want to do something that just sounds the same as a previous one, but you don’t want to have it sound radically different either. People are at this point in their aging lives, looking for some familiarity. They know what they like to have for Sunday lunch, and they know what they like to listen to.”

The Tull lineup has changed since they last toured pre-Covid, and he says he’s gotten some energy from the fresh blood. “When I write for a new project I think of the personalities of the musicians involved. And since we couldn’t play in a room together during the Covid years, it was exhilarating to do that. We’ve still got a musical style that keeps us from sounding like a bunch of other people. And keeps them from sounding like us, since it’s quite difficult to play.”

The past decade has brought deluxe reissues of every Jethro Tull album in order; 1982’s synth-heavy “The Broadsword & the Beast” was the latest to appear last summer. This has required Anderson to go back and listen to every song the band ever recorded, including the ones that got rejected at the time. “I expected a lot of disappointing surprises when I started work on it. But I was relatively relaxed after listening to the music two or three times. Even the songs that didn’t meet the standard, when you put them in the context of the era and my age at the time, nothing was too dreadful.  Maybe a half dozen were just a little dreadful.”

Frenship partners Sunderland and Brett Hite began as two actual friends who worked in a Lululemon store in Los Angeles together, bonding over their mutual love of synthesizer pop. Success came to them in a hurry when their 2016 single “Capsize”– a collaboration with singer Emily Warren, and only the fourth song Frenship ever released — became an online sensation, racking up 505 million Spotify streams.

“It changed our lives, but probably not as much as you’d imagine,” Hite says. “Had we known the ins and outs of the music industry we’d have done it differently — like we would own our houses now, and be driving nicer cars. Spotify is a weird measure of success, because it’s so much passive listening. It’s not like the old days where you went to a record store, held the disc in hand and consumed the whole branding of a band. So that felt strange to us.”

Adds Sunderland, “I’ll always gag when I hear an A&R guy say, ‘That’s a hit.’ I would say that the cocky young part of me wanted ‘Capsize’ to get to a large level and thought it had the accessibility to do really well. I knew it had the goal to be liked by a lot of people. But I wouldn’t have placed a platinum record on it.”

Painstaking as songwriters, they’ve released only one full album so far. They’re now touring behind a six-song EP, “Base Camp,” which includes a couple of previous singles (including the pandemic-themed “Lover or an Enemy”) and the politically slanted “Copenhagen,” about relocating there to escape the U.S. gun epidemic. “The ideas can come from anywhere,” says Hite. “We’ve gotten a little more patient with our songwriting, if something’s not working we don’t force it. It’s not like songwriting is some crazy skill we have — We can spend 16 hours in a room trying to come up with a verse.”

Though the EP includes an acoustic track. Sunderland still proclaims his love for the synthesizer. “Listening to Brian Eno was one thing that turned my head around, especially the [Eno produced] Coldplay album ‘Viva la Vida.’ That made me realize that a whole song can start out with just sound.”

Their current tour, which hits Brighton Music Hall Sunday,  had a shakeup just last week, when they opted to let their drummer go and continue as a duo. “It messed everything up, but in a good way,” Sunderand says. “Our regular drummer couldn’t make the tour so we got someone else in who was a good drummer, but after 22 hours we knew it wasn’t working. So that threw us into a figure-it-out mode, and we’re still reimagining the show as we speak. We were kind of desperate to burn it all down and do something we haven’t done before.”

“He was the first artist that made me say, ‘I didn’t know we were allowed to say things like that, that you could use the English language this way’,” she recalls. “It felt really special because my parents didn’t listen to him and I didn’t have any friends who did. And I felt really smart because he expects so much of his audience — and also the fact that he was Canadian just seemed crazy to me. I must have spent that whole day going over his Wikipedia page.”

Recently signed to the Fantasy label, Bobbitt makes a return to the Boston area at Deep Cuts Monday evening, on a bill with Will Butler. It’s her second visit this fall, following a show at the Crystal Ballroom last month.

During her teen years Bobbitt earned some online fame by posting a long string of cover songs on the now-defunct social media platform Vine. “It certainly got interesting. I wasn’t sure what to think when people had some opinion of me based on the kind of song I was playing, or the shirt I was wearing — People do say a lot on the internet. But it motivated me and reassured me that I was doing something right, that people were enjoying it on some level. But the biggest motivator for doing my own music was when I moved away from the small town I grew up in, and into Toronto. That’s when I said, ‘Hey, other people are doing this. Maybe it isn’t so inaccessible and far away’.”

You’d never confuse Bobbitt’s singing voice for Cohen’s, but the two do have something in common: They both spin melodic beauty out of emotional chaos. Bobbitt’s lyrics may address bad relationships and painful times, but the songs are often deceptively pretty, in a sophisticated jazz-pop setting. Take “The Call’s Inside the House,” a track from her recent EP “The Half We Still Have.” It’s about romantic betrayal and even ends with a chant of “How dare you”.

“That was an important song for me, I think. It has a lot of the details of my life and the people I love, and I hope it’s relatable. When I sing it I feel I have a certain amount of power, in a situation where I was powerless. After awhile it starts to feel more like a mantra than excavating these old emotions, so I find it invigorating. I think that’s a through line of the music I love and that I listen to, where the lyrics are confessional and the music is emotive.”

Another empowering song, “More,” came out of an experience with physical illness. “I was going through a lot of pelvic pain, and that experience of going to the doctor and feeling like you’re shouting into the void. And it was tied to the fact that I have a woman’s body and the ability to carry a child, but not necessarily wanting to do that. That song in particular has caused a lot of people to tell me it got them through something.”

“I have written a couple of happy songs, but maybe they don’t translate that way,” she says. “My goal is to do for someone what the music I love does for me.”

The albums have indeed proven timeless, and the current incarnation of Little Feat plays them both at the Wilbur on Monday and Tuesday; doing one album plus bonus tracks each night. The band has weathered some major losses, including the death of founder Lowell George in 1979 and the more recent passings of drummer Richie Hayward and guitarist Paul Barrere. But Little Feat is now recognized as the precursors of Americana and the jam-band movement. And after all these years, they’ve still never had a hit single.

“That’s probably a blessing in disguise,” says Bill Payne, the band’s keyboardist and cofounder. “I know Lowell had grand hopes for ‘Easy to Slip’ as a single, and I thought that one sounded great, but it didn’t happen. We were in an age of albums, and we came up in a time when people were promulgating the whole album and not the single. That made it difficult for us commercially, but I think it’s allowed us to last 50 years. We weren’t the Doobie Brothers (another band Payne has played with). They’ve lasted 50 years as well — but I’ll put it this way, we had a wider vocabulary.”

The “Dixie Chicken” album brought two New Orleanians into the band (bassist Kenny Gradney and percussionist Sam Clayton, both still aboard) along with that city’s musical influence. “It was a grand experiment and a fun one at that,” says Payne. “My parents were married in New Orleans, which probably explains a lot. We always loved trading our different influences with each other. Little Feat is really a platform that invites inclusion, but it’s also something of an exclusive club. We’re like an Appalachian family that lets a few people through the door every now and then.”

Payne admits that continuing the band without George, and now without Barrere and Hayward, has been a challenge. (The new frontman is Scott Sherrard, late of the Gregg Allman Band). “Put it this way: Back in 1966 when I was in high school, I went with my friends to see the Yardbirds, and I was there specifically to see Jeff Beck. We were all pretty ticked off that he wasn’t there, until the other guy started to play guitar — and it was Jimmy Page. So I took my impetus from that concert years later when we were putting Little Feat back together without Lowell. Same thing with Scott now — If it wasn’t working I would have been the first to say, ‘Just let it go, our legacy’s too important’.”

The two albums getting played this week include a handful of Feat standards, along with a couple songs that have never been played live before. “We’re going to do the experiment in terror and play those. It’s challenging, but it’s not like we’re copying Stravinsky or trading licks with Charlie Parker. My frustration with Little Feat from time to time is that we’ve compromised our vocabulary a little too much for my taste. So I’m very happy to be exploring the catalogue with players who can do just about anything. That’s the essence of what we’ve always been, a group that has found its challenges by the platform that we live by, which is our songs.”

And after all these years, she still gets people asking her what the song is about. (It roughly concerns a woman asking respect from her partner, including being there when she’s buried). “This may sound precious but I actually figure songs out years later — ‘Oh, that’s what I meant!’ So I am still figuring it out too. And I like it when people make up their own stories too, to be honest. I love hearing people say ‘This is what I get from this’.”

Donelly originally formed Belly in 1991 after being the second singer/songwriter in Throwing Muses and the Breeders; then her own songs started pouring out. The classic lineup of Donelly, bassist Gail Greenwood, guitarist Tom Gorman and drummer Chris Gorman reunited in 2016 after two decades apart. Shows since then have been infrequent but they play the Paradise on Wednesday and Thursday, as part of a mini-tour that begins this Saturday at Fort Adams in Newport and will wrap up with West Coast dates with the Breeders.

The shows will debut a couple of songs from Belly’s second reunion album, which is mostly written but not yet recorded. “I feel that this bunch of songs is the most varied we’ve ever done. Even playing them in practice we were thinking, ‘Well, this is a super odd batch of songs, but in a really good way’.” She admits it’s a bit daunting to play new songs live, knowing they’ll probably be on YouTube by morning. “I don’t love that everything ends up on the internet; I’m a little old-school to be honest. When we play these songs live, we’ll do a spoken disclaimer that they’re being workshopped in real time. But we feel that playing them live will be revealing for us, in terms of which direction to go — You know how they say, one show is worth ten practices. So we are going to do the vulnerable thing.”

Donelly has played with numerous solo bands over the years, but Belly always had its own magic — a band that can sound dreamlike and mysterious even while rocking out. “That gets ascribed to me a lot but it is really all four of us who are contributing to that ‘ethereality’,” she says. “When we started the band, there was this feeling of experiment around it — We didn’t have a five year plan at all, it was just these people playing this group of songs. That’s the luxury and excitement of being in your 20’s, we had the time and the energy. Now it’s more like, ‘Okay, I can meet you tomorrow between eleven and three’.”

Yet the band remains special to her. “I just think we have very four very strong, very different personalities that just kind of jelled in spite of the differences. There is also a lot of joy in this band, a lot of laughter, a lot of love — and I know how corny that sounds, but it’s true. I also think our relationship with the people that come to our shows and love our music is really special. I hate to use the word ‘fans’ but our fan-friends have built relationships with us and with each other. So the reunion is not just for us, but for everybody in the room.”

“It was a cute post, wasn’t it?,” she told us later that morning. “I am hoping that her fans will be super excited, even if they don’t know us. I think audiences are different now. If a band comes out in front of the headliner, they know he headliner has backed them and they won’t be mean. We’ve been in front of Foo Fighters audiences and they’re a really sweet crowd, with husbands and wives sharing their love for that band. And this will be my first time at Madison Square Garden — unless the Pixies ever played there, but I really have no idea.” (In fact they did, but only after Deal’s departure).

Before that happens, the Breeders will be in Boston Sunday night to play the entirety of their “Last Splash” album at the House of Blues. When the Breeders made that album 30 years ago, they were still fresh from playing Sunday nights at the Middle East in Cambridge. But “Last Splash” became one of alternative rock’s cornerstone albums and gave the Breeders more recognition than they expected.

“I was used to our albums being stuck in the import bins at Newbury Comics — when they still wrapped the CD’s in plastic, remember? So there was no expectation that anything we did would ever get on the radio, even though I knew ‘Cannonball’ was a good song. But we never looked at the Top Ten, because who was on that? The worst bands in the world. And suddenly they were all talking about this crazy alternative rock thing. To us that meant there was a college circuit, where we could actually tour from city to city and play with all kinds of cool bands, like Husker Du and R.E.M.”

As an Ohio transplant, Deal recalls being impressed by the Boston circuit. “Everybody seemed really smart and successful, and I felt like a failure to launch. I remember Charles (aka Frank Black of the Pixies) throwing a party and it wasn’t cocaine or smack — He had tables full of hummus. People were really funny too — I remember touring with Throwing Muses, and that was the funniest tour I’ve ever been on.”

The classic lineup of the Breeders — Deal and her sister Kelley on vocals and guitar with bassist Josephine Wiggs and drummer Jim McPherson — as now been reunited far longer than they were originally together. They made a reunion album “All Nerve” in 2018 and are slowly working on another. “It’s better because we’re sober — That’s a big, huge difference. It changes communication when people are conscious. Maybe somebody’s having a bad day, but they’re not hurting from a hangover. And it certainly does help when people are able to wake up.”

The Breeders’ reunion coincided with Deal’s final exit from the Pixies — and though she wishes that band well, she won’t be back. “I think they’re loving what they do, they’re doing a fantastic job, and they’re probably going to be in existence longer than I was with them. They deserve a pat on the back. But I also get people coming up to me and saying ‘You know, I like the Breeders even though I never liked the Pixies’.”

“It was initially written as an antinuclear song,” he said this week. “We were thinking of two people melting together as the world explodes. And that’s probably what you’d do if the world was ending, you’d want to be with the person you love. Everybody has their own interpretation, but it started out about making love as the bomb drops.” But he doesn’t mind if people have a softer interpretation. “I’m a sexual person, and I enjoy pursuing the art of sex with my wife,” he says. “And we’re not the kind of band that hates the fact that we had a very popular song. It makes the concerts more fun — I don’t even have to sing it, the crowd does it for me. And it pays all our bills.”

Having toured extensively in recent years, Modern English plays the Hawks and Reed Center in Greenfield on Saturday and Sonia in Central Square Sunday. The lineup is nearly the same quintet that made “I Melt With You” in 1982; only the drum slot has changed. “We’ve gotten to know each other so well that we can let things slide that we probably couldn’t have done in our 20’s, there would have been more arguing and fighting. But if you’ve heard us, you know there isn’t anything like Gary (McDowell)’s guitar work, or the atmospheric sounds Stephen (Walker) makes on his keyboards.”

Modern English was originally part of a vital post-punk scene in the UK, though they probably had stronger commercial instincts than peers like Killing Joke or Joy Division. “To my mind, one of the big differences is that American groups were better musicians; but people like us were more interested in sound textures — That’s why we used so many pedals. The craft of songwriting wasn’t high on the list for most post-punk bands, including us. If you listen to (Modern English’s debut) ‘Mesh & Lace’ it hasn’t got any songwriting at all, it’s just pieces of music stuck together — That’s why I like it. It was (producer) Hugh Jones who really introduced us to songwriting, and ‘I Melt With You’ was the first song I really sang on instead of just shouting.”

The band is about to release a new album, “1-2-3-4,” and the advance single “Long in the Tooth” is that rare thing in rock, a song that celebrates aging. “When I introduce it onstage, I say it’s about getting a little older and a little bolder. It’s about how I don’t want to just age and wither away, but keep some kind of spirit in my life.” This seems a far cry from the world-weary lyrics he wrote in younger days. “That hasn’t changed much, to be honest. I get confused as to why I feel the same way and haven’t grown more, but I think that’s true for everyone. We all feel displaced sometimes, and I like to put that into the songs.”

“I never got that, because I thought that what we did was perfectly normal,” singer and guitarist Glenn Tilbrook said recently. “But now when I listen back, we were pretty damn quirky. I mean, ‘Black Coffee in Bed’ has three different kinds of verses — Why did we do that? But it seemed normal at the time.”

Normal or not, Squeeze wound up with a trunk full of killer singles, all of which should be played when they hit the Wang Theatre with the Psychedelic Furs Tuesday. Tilbrook and co-singer/writing partner Chris Difford have guided Squeeze through numerous lineups, but the new one is a little different. It’s the first septet version, adding a full-time steel guitarist (Melvin Duffy) and an extra singer/percussionist, Steve Smith who used to front the band Dirty Vegas (and lived briefly in Boston). So expect a few new spins on familiar tunes.

“This is the best Squeeze has ever been vocally, that’s for sure,” Tilbrook says. “At last we can do harmonies after all these years, along with my and Chris’ very distinctive octave vocals — The older I get, the more I love that sound. And the band now is so tight and so disciplined that we can really open the songs up. I’m not talking about doing jazz versions of ‘Tempted’ or anything, but now we can reinterpret the songs that we didn’t get right the first time.”

The latest UK single “Food for Thought” has the tunefulness of classic Squeeze. But it’s also one of their few topical songs, written to aid a UK food bank. “There’s a place for having a social conscience and an opinion, as long as you don’t force it down peoples’ throat and give them something else with it, like a nice tune. So we like to pick our moments. Also, I am quite influenced by the genius of hip-hop culture. I know Squeeze will never be that, but maybe we can filter that into Squeeze without sounding ridiculous.”

More new material is on the way, along with some very old material. To celebrate the 50th year of his partnership with Difford, Squeeze are planning to make two albums next year: One will be new material, the other will feature the very first songs they wrote together in 1973-74, predating their first album by a few years. “What I love about those songs is that they’re the sum total of my musical knowledge up to 1974. There was a little jazz in there that came from my parents’ record collection seeping into my consciousness. And another reference point for us at that time was Sparks, they were a big influence on us. But at that time we were mostly desperate to get a toe hold. It took another two years before we got any gigs, which felt like eternity at that time.”

As for the next batch of songs, most of those have yet to be written. “Chris and I can find it difficult to get started, it can be like pulling teeth. But those frustrations are part of the process, and we’ve been through it before. We’re going to Los Angeles after the tour, and it will be the first time we’ve ever tracked an album properly there. So I think we’ll be in good shape by then.”

“Sometimes I feel like I was born at the wrong time,” Weiner said this week. “But I also feel like I’m here for the perfect moment. I get to be a torch carrier. We have a song called ‘Revolution Rock & Roll,’ where I say that if I don’t preserve it, I don’t deserve it. So many things that came before me were life-sustaining for so many people — and for me, because I found a life through rock and roll and through performance art. This is certainly not something to get into if you want to make a lot of money, or to get into the top echelons of the music business these days. But damn, it is a fun way to live your life.”

On a good night, Low Cut Connie can renew your faith in rock — or even on a good morning. This writer caught them at the New Orleans Jazzfest last May, when they had the no-glory slot of 11 a.m. They delivered a full-throttle performance, with Weiner (the only consistent member of a band that can get up to 12 pieces) throttling his piano, jumping into the crowd and even dusting off a few vintage New Orleans R&B tunes. They’ll be at the Sinclair Thursday to support a new album, “Art Dealers,” which looks back fondly at the cultural freedom of an earlier time.

“I’m fascinated by the music, film and culture from the ‘70s, because I missed it,” he says. (Weiner is in his early 40’s). “There was so much debauchery and sleaze and experimentation, but that was all over by the time I came onto the scene. I moved to New York [from Philadelphia] in 1998 and met people who were part of the punk scene and the adult film world. Many of them were just forgotten, but their spirit was ‘I don’t regret it, I lived through the most amazing time ever’. And in Philadelphia I got to talk to people who were part of the city’s R&B explosion. Most of them don’t get any glory, but they lived it all — and that’s who I wanted to write about.”

Weiner’s most prominent fans include Barack Obama, who included Low Cut Connie on one of his playlists, and Elton John, who’s namechecked the band onstage. “I wouldn’t say those endorsements have had any effect on my career per se. The unfortunate part is that the music industry hasn’t given me much — I never got signed to a label, I had to start my own. And I’ve never been on a single Spotify curated playlist. So when people like Obama, Elton John and Springsteen voice their support for what I’m doing it, really means the world.”

For him it’s still all about what happens onstage. “I’m inspired by a group of the greatest entertainers of all time that came before me — People like Tina Turner, James Brown, Freddie Mercury and my hero, Prince. People who get onstage and become the least boring person you’ve ever seen. I can’t tell you what happens when I’m onstage because my brain turns off and I’m absolutely in the moment. Afterwards people say, ‘I don’t believe you did that.’ Then they show me a video and I don’t believe I did it either.”

A local favorite in the ‘80s and early ‘90s, Treat Her Right opened punk-trained ears to the blues and R&B that they loved. Two of its members, guitarist Mark Sandman and drummer Billy Conway, went onto national success with Morphine. Both are now deceased, but cofounders David Champagne (vocals/guitar) and Jim Fitting (harmonica) have remained fixtures on the rock and roots scene. They’ll take a rare spin through the Treat Her Right catalogue, with the core band completed by drummer Jerome Deupree (Conway’s friend and a fellow Morphine alum) and Russ Gershon (the local jazz saxophonist, here taking a rare turn on bass guitar). And the “dancers”– who in truth will be doing more singing — include a bunch of local names: ex-Face to Face and Twinemen frontwoman Laurie Sargent (who was married to Conway), songwriters Rose Polenzani, Katie Champagne, Franc Graham and others.

“It’s going to be somewhat ramshackled, but in a good way,” David Champagne said last week. “Our first idea was to have it be like when fans jump onstage to sing a song, but it evolved into something more than that. We thought we’d reach out to some of the women who used to be there dancing, and some others who might have been fans.” And yes, one of the women will be singing Treat Her Right’s greatest hit, “I Think She Likes Me.” Says Champagne, “There will certainly be a lot of gender-fluid meanings added to some of the stuff.”

Treat Her Right’s founders were all school friends who bonded over their love for vintage records on the Chess label. “I thought Mark was the only white person I’d ever met who could sing that music and not sound silly,” Champagne recalls. Adds Fitting in a separate interview, “That stripped-down sound we had was our attempt to take that Chess sound to the present day. We were kind of evangelical about it. We weren’t out there saying ‘Yes, everybody dig the blues’. It was more like ‘This is a great sound and it’s music that inspires us, so check it out’.

They ultimately made two albums on the RCA label, but their warmest memories are of shows played in small clubs. Says Champagne, “I remember playing a gig on the Jersey shore opening for the Georgia Satellites — They had these walls of Marshall amps and there were 50,000 people there — but that wasn’t what we were about. We were really an outlier in a way — for instance, we were about ten years older than the Pixies. But we knew we had something, from the first few months we were together. It’s like falling in love, when you know its unique and it just works.”

While this show is a one-off, Champange is still writing new songs and Fitting is playing harmonica in another local roots institution, Session Americana. “I feel that music’s been in a funny place the last 50 years,” Champagne says. “You can do what you did back then and people will still be entertained by it. It’s difficult to be innovative using the same tools. But that’s not gonna stop me from trying.”

“My musical taste goes all over the map,” he said this week. “It started with soul music, my earliest influences were James Brown and Otis Redding. But I was lucky to have two older brothers, who were not only music nuts but record collectors as well. The first time I heard Pink Floyd was ‘Dark Side’ in 1973, and I loved it so much that I had to go backward and hear the rest. As with all the music that we choose to be influenced by, it’s timeless.”

The first “Dark Side of the Mule” show happened at the Orpheum in Boston: It was Halloween in 2008, and the band honored its annual tradition of a surprise cover set. “We only meant to do it that one time, but there was demand and now we’re bringing it back for the anniversary. We have so much reverence for that music that we try to keep the vibe of the original; song by song we make the decision of how far we’re going to stray. On this tour we’re opening it up more to interpretation.” Along with a good 90 minutes of Floyd, including all of ‘Dark Side’ and more, they’ll play an intro set of Mule originals.

Haynes says he’s met Roger Waters once, when Haynes was in the Allman Brothers Band and Eric Clapton joined them onstage; Clapton’s friend Waters was hanging out afterwards. “We also were both part of a tribute to Levon [Helm] a few years later. But I’ve never spoken to him or David Gilmour about what they might think of what we’re doing. I’m sure it would be a pretty strange issue.”

The Floyd shows are just one stretch of a long run of touring through this year. Future Mule shows will focus more on the new album “Peace…Like a River,” an epic one even by their standards. Full of long and ambitious tracks, the album was recorded in tandem with a blues disc that they already released and toured last summer.

“On paper I suppose that sounds a little strange and daunting, but it turned out to really be the opposite. We’d start at noon with the ‘Peace’ songs and work till nine at night, then we’d have some dinner, go to the small room and play blues. That was our way of shutting our brains off and playing for fun.” Most of the ‘Peace’ songs were written during shutdown. “That was one good thing about it, the ability to settle down and write a ton of music. We wanted to bring back the idea of longer, more complex arrangements, and part of the mission was to have songs that sound like they go together, but don’t sound like each other.”

In fact the album often brings their proggy, Floyd-like side into play. “Gov’t Mule started as a side project [from the Allman Brothers], and we thought we were only going to make one record. At the time it was our notion to being back the improvisational rock trio. Once it became apparent that we were going to be a real band, we started bringing out more of our influences. So here it is, 12 albums later and we’re still painting in colors we haven’t used in the past.”

For tickets and info, visit livenation.com

“There was a time when there was nothing else I listened to,” says keyboardist Christopher Dowd. “Playing with these guys every night, it just reminds me of being 14-year-old-Chris who would freak out at the very thought of hanging out with George Clinton. I don’t mean to diss any new music but the process for creating art is so different now; all people want is faster tempos and more volume. There’s a certain attention to detail that I feel is missing, and to me George Clinton is the last beacon.” Fishbone appear as special guests at the Clinton/P-Funk show at the MGM Music Hall on Thursday.

In fact the members of Fishbone all managed to get into a landmark P-Funk show at the Beverly Theater in Hollywood in 1983. That show became a live album and solidified the young band’s musical direction. “That became our first entry into funk and had us saying, ‘Hey, this isn’t too far off. Maybe we can do this thing too.’ At the same time, being in Los Angeles, the punk thing was really bubbling up; we’d see thousands of kids filling venues for the Circle Jerks. When the punk kids saw us, we were the first Black kids that were really into the same music they were. They expected us to be like the Gap Band or Cameo and we said ‘No, man. We’d rather see the Specials and Devo’.”

Fishbone wound up being one of the originators of punk funk (with ska added to the mix), and they’ve since been namechecked by everyone from OutKast to Lenny Kravitz. “It’s been a trip,” Dowd says. “But I’ve been surprised by my entire career. I feel that music manages to do what it’s supposed to.”

Dowd returned to Fishbone five years ago after a long absence; and with the return of trumpet player “Dirty Walt” Kirby (joining long-timers John Norwood Fisher on bass and frontman Angelo Moore), Fishbone now has two-thirds of its classic lineup back in place after many personnel changes. “I just felt like it was part of my artistic legacy to come back and try to make some good music with my friends. But it’s complicated, because you always want to evolve, but you’re also thinking, ‘Wow, I’m back to this thing that I did when I was at the height of my powers.’ You evolve and your tastes change, what you want to accomplish changes. There are some complicated feelings there, but I’m grateful that we’re as close to the original thing as we can get.”

For all that, the band’s new five-track EP does hark back to classic Fishbone. The lead track “All We Have is Now” recalls their uplifting hit “Everyday Sunshine”; and “Estranged Fruit” (an update of the classic Billie Holiday song about lynchings) maintains their political edge. The EP paired the band with a strong-minded producer, Fat Mike from the band NOFX, and for Dowd that took some getting used to. “I was sitting on the sidelines saying ‘You mean I can’t touch it?”. My problem is that I’m such a perfectionist; the guys in the band were saying ‘Man, you’re worse than (rap producer) Q-Tip’. So I was probably one of the reasons why it took so long.”

She will join a pair of fellow songwriters, Deb Talan and Heather Maloney, for an “in the round” concert at the Fruitlands Museum in Harvard next Wednesday; with all three onstage together. All three started their careers here and went onto build a national following. Talan has returned to solo status after a successful run with the Weepies, a duo with her then-husband. And Delmhorst has earned a rep as one of the more inventive songwriters around, drawing from alternative pop as well as acoustic music.

She may also be the first songwriter in history to rhyme “mercies” with “Xerxes,” the ancient Persian emperor. That song, “Nothing Bout Nothing,” appears on her last album “Long Day in the Milky Way<” whose atmospheric production and rich arrangements place it well outside the acoustic mainstream.

“I was trying to write about the hubris of humanity,” she explains. “So I went down this rabbit hole of reading about famous hubristic people in the world. And I read about Xerxes trying to get across the Aegean, the weather was bad and to get his boat across, he had people literally whipping the ocean with whips. That seemed a perfect metaphor for the delusional sense of control that humans have over the world.”

“I’ve always had a problem with that word ‘folksinger,’” she said. “To me it’s associated with a social commentary role, and that’s something I don’t take up explicitly very often. The way I write is from the inside out, sometimes I don’t know what a song is quote-unquote ‘about’ until it’s done. Rock, pop and jazz is really where I come from. Before I started doing it the closest I came to folk music was someone like Tracy Chapman — very song based but still in the popular music world. Or someone like Sinead, which is all anyone can talk about right now.”

She also has an enduring love for the Cars, and devoted a full album to their songs a few years back. “That was an interesting one. Some of my fans said ‘Ha ha, see you on the next one.’ But some people loved it so much, and probably connected to that record more than other things I’ve done. That will happen when you go on tangents, and that’s fine. Doing that one was a joy all the way through.”

Recently Delmhorst was involved with another meaningful project, an album of songs by the late Morphine drummer Billy Conway. She and a number of notable singers (including her husband Jeffrey Foucault and Conway’s wife Laurie Sargent) made music in Conway’s house during his illness, after his passing they polished the tapes into an album that was released last January.

“Everybody knew Billy was an incredible drummer, but there are so many layers to his participation in music. When he was leaving the building there were always people in the next room laughing and crying, making music and telling stories. It became a way for all of us to grieve together, to process it all as a group.” They are still hoping to get together and perform the album live. “We’d really love to do that. But at the moment the logistics are a little extreme, and the emotional content is too.”

“Back when we were 17, nobody was thinking that the songs would be serving us our whole life,” says Paul Cowsill of the Newport-raised family band. “I would have just said, ‘Yeah, if we’re doing this after 50, just get us off the stage fast.”

Adds Vogues frontman Troy Elich , “Believe me, nobody back then thought they’d be doing these songs 60 years later. If they had, they never would have sung in those keys.”

Now the biggest ‘60s pop tour, Happy Together has lasted far longer than the ‘60s themselves. The package tour was launched in 1984 with the Turtles as headliners, and named after their greatest hit. Faces have changed over the years: The Turtles will still close the show Sunday night at the Lynn Memorial Auditorium but their lead singer Howard Kaylan has retired; his place is being taken by Ron Dante, the voice of the Archies. The Cowsills are now on their eighth go-round, the Vogues on their second. Joining up this year is the silken-voiced Little Anthony of Imperials fame, plus perennials Gary Puckett and the Classics IV.

The Cowsills spend part of the year doing new music together and separately (They made a new album “Rhythm of the World” last year), but are glad to hop back on the bus every summer. “It’s like music camp,” says Susan Cowsill. “The vibe is that we’re going to have a beautiful summer and we’re going to make a lot of people happy.” Adds older brother Bob, “This feels like a validation. We knew we belonged on this tour but I took a few years to land it. The personality changes every year, the new guys get acclimated and the veterans are smiling as they go through what we did.”

The siblings were all teenagers (or younger in Susan’s case) when “The Rain, the Park and Other Things” hit in ‘67. “We’d already been dropped by two labels, then they added our mom to the group. So we sure weren’t saying ‘We’re going to have a hit now’,” recalls Bob. And Paul says there are a few echoes with those days. “We’re on a bus tour and we’re going out there every night and killing it. It’s always good to see audiences from our past, but now it’s our present.”

The Cowsills are the closest to original lineup on the tour; Bob, Paul and Susan were all in the ‘60s group. On the other hand the Vogues have no originals, but there’s still a direct connection. Frontman Elich is a second-generation member who had to audition for his dad; he has sung with the founding members who have died or retired. And though he joined in the 2000s, Elich is well schooled in the group’s history.

“I was a Vogues fan long before I joined, when I was a teenager and my dad was in the group,” he said. “I even told the guys how much I liked those really bizarre singles they made before their hits, which they thought were garbage,” he said. The Vogues actually had two hit stretches in the ‘60s– the first hits had working-class themes and a Philly soul-inspired sound; the later ones were pop standards with orchestra. “Nobody could believe it was the same group,” Elich said. “But if you look at [their greatest hit] ‘Five O’Clock World’, that was their lives; they were all working in factories and steel mills. That song could not have mirrored their lives any better than it did.”

He says that Happy Together has given him a taste of ‘60s style touring, “Little sleep, lots of travel and big venues, but it’s great. For a group like us this tour is the only chance to work 60 times in a summer. It gives us all a chance to feel like rock stars.”

“We come in and people are like, ‘What the hell is this, and what’s a synthesizer? Where’s the guitars?’ recalls lead singer Terri Nunn. “But we really believed in what we were doing, and thank God we kept at it.” As for her onstage style, “We loved that film-noir kind of vibe, we never went onstage in jeans. For me the idea was to set an example that being an adult is fun, that it’s something to look forward to. For a lot of my friends, and for me with an alcoholic dad, it didn’t look like much fun getting older. And I wanted to put it out there that some really good parts were still coming to us.”

Nunn has lately reunited with Berlin’s other core members, bassist and main songwriter John Crawford and synthesizer player David Diamond, and this lineup will appear with fellow ‘80s survivors Culture Club and Howard Jones at Xfinity Center on Tuesday. And for Nunn, the band is sweeter the second time around. “It’s not like I’m somebody else, but there’s so much growth I’ve gone through, and I see that in them too. There isn’t all that fear and ego that we had as kids. I met John when I was 18, and we really didn’t know how to do this. Now there’s so much gratefulness, that we get to do it together as who we are now.”

After their modest start, Berlin had a run of hits including “Sex,” “Masquerade” and “No More Words.” But their greatest hit, 1986’s “Take My Breath Away,” proved a tipping point for the band. It was a soundtrack song (for the movie, “Top Gun”) brought in by German synth maestro Giorgio Moroder, and that was a tough one for the band’s main writer Crawford. “It wasn’t until recently that I really heard what that meant to John,” Nunn said. “He said, ‘I was struggling to write songs that the label would like, that the audiences would like. And in walks Giorgio with this song that everybody loves, he pulls it out of his hat, while I’ve been killing myself trying to write the next album’. I can see how that pressed on him.”

Crawford and Nunn are both writing new songs for Berlin, and their next new release is likely to be an original Christmas album. But meanwhile Nunn has another project on tap: She’s executive-producing a movie that her former boyfriend, TV and radio personality Richard Blade, wrote about their wild romance in the 80s. Nunn said that a number of big names — including Julia Garner (“Ozark”), Florence Pugh, and Anya Taylor-Joy — are in the running to play her.

“Our romance was spectacularly good and bad, it had all the elements of a rock and roll nightmare — Very high and very low. Richard is an amazing man and I think we’re better friends than we were lovers. We were both jerks and not there for each other, but it’s important to not sugarcoat things. I didn’t even find out that he’d run around on me until I read the book.”

How does she feel now about her 20-year old self? “I look at interviews I did back then and I say, “Augh, she’s so serious!’ But I have compassion for that woman because she was scared all the time. I was afraid to feel things because I thought I’d fall apart if I did, so I hid behind this intense, ‘I have it all together’ personality. It was bull, but that’s how I walked around. So it’s nice to be older and to know that the universe is benevolent, that everything that happens is for our greatest happiness and benefit. I sure didn’t know it then.”

Don’t expect an arena show when the pair plays City Winery (www.citywinery.com) this weekend — but if you come in as a Leppard fan, that’s alright with them. “I personally love that because if people come into the room, they’re here to receive what we’re giving,” Monroe said in a Zoom interview this week. “Some people come because they know Rick, and I’m always happy to have a hard-sell room to start with, Once they get into what we’re doing, they open their hearts to our work. And helping other people is part of our mission as a couple.”

Playing the back room at the Winery will certainly be a different experience for Allen, whose last Boston show was at Fenway Park with Def Leppard. “I actually find that more challenging sometimes because you feel more exposed. When you’re in an arena there is always a buffer between you and the audience. When I play with Lauren I use my acoustic kit, like the one I had growing up — so in a way it’s more challenging, because I’m playing acoustic drums with one arm. So playing with her has helped hone my musical skills.

“But I love playing any venues — especially one like this, when you get to help people through a difficult situation,” he said. “We are both traumatized; everybody is in their own way.”

Allen’s traumas stem partly from a car crash he suffered during Def Leppard’s heyday, causing him to lose his left arm. He learned to drum without it, thanks to an electronic footpad kit.  After the 1984 accident, Allen went right back to work on Leppard’s megahit album “Hysteria,” and says he didn’t really deal with the experience until much later. “I didn’t have the vocabulary for what I went through. Some of my experiences were so profound but over the years I feel like I’ve done a lot of processing,” he says.

The couple initially met more than 20 years ago, when Allen was having physical issues and sough a massage therapist. Since marrying they’ve done extensive work with veterans and first responders dealing with PTSD and have set up a charity, the Raven Drum Foundation. Last Christmas the foundation auctioned off a Taylor Swift guitar, among other celebrity items.

Their live shows accordingly contain a lot of audience interaction. “We start the evening in a roomful of strangers and at the end of it, everybody is looking at each other because they went through something together. The energy in the room shifts and everybody is in this unified field of emotion.” Adds Allen, “I’ve seen tears of joy and sadness and everything in between, including in the band. I always go onstage with a box of tissues in hand.”

To ask the devil’s advocate question, what about the rock & roll taboo of playing music with your husband or wife? “I’d say we create our own path and as soon as people know us, they get it,” Monroe says. “And if there’s judgment, so be it.”

“I took no pleasure in writing those songs, for the first time in my life,” he said this week. “And I’d like to say I worked hard on the song about President Zelenskyy, but the fact is that I put no thought at all into it. I wrote it in such a hurry because I didn’t think he would survive the coming week. There’s a line at the end about him being dead or alive, and I wanted the song to exist beyond him.” The song will be featured when Five for Fighting play the Leader Bank Pavilion on Sunday, opening the Barenaked Ladies’ “Last Summer on Earth” tour.

Las summer Ondrasik traveled to Kyiv and performed the song with the Ukranian Orchestra; that session was captured on a video that’s gone viral. “I could talk to you for days about that. It took a couple of miracles for us to get there, and everyone in the orchestra had lost a loved one or had somebody missing. We’re playing in front of this plane with the nose cone shot off, with this onslaught of military coming at us. I’ll never forget the way the general just looked at us and said, ‘Let me hear your song’. Then the orchestra lifted their shoulders, stiffened their backs and started to play. These military guys are like 250 pound Rambos, and we could see them putting on their sunglasses because they were starting to cry. And then it hit me that nobody knew the words; even the orchestra didn’t speak English. All this emotion was just created through music.”

Ondrasik is no stranger to topical songwriting. His breakthrough hit “Superman (It’s Not Easy)” became an unofficial 9/11 anthem, though he wrote it for very different reasons. “It was really a selfish song, about hitting the brick wall of the music business and not being able to be heard — When you’re a 23 year old songwriter, ‘It’s not easy to be me’ makes sense, and that’s not a song I could write today. But when we did the Concert for New York and I watched The Who blow the roof off, it was an education in how music matters. It changed my perspective on how much there is beyond charts and ticket sales.”

There hasn’t been a full Five for Fighting album in 10 years, and fans may assume Ondrasik is too busy with his political activism. But in fact he runs an entirely different family business– and you have probably used it without realizing. “Our claim to fame is that we make the best shopping cart in the world. My dad is now 85 so I’ve had to take it over; I have 400 employees and I’ve worked on that my whole life. But lately we’ve changed the management, so I do hope to have time for another record — for folks who are still familiar with what records are.”

One feature of this tour is that both bands are closing their sets with beloved classic-rock cover tunes. And without giving away the title, Five for Fighting have chosen one that’s a little bit operatic. “What can I say, I’m a child of the ‘70s and those songwriters and classic rockers were part of my era. That song is a little tough to sing, because of course it starts as a piano ballad. We have moments of introspection on this tour, but for the most part t really is fun. And I have the most fun blowing my voice out at the end.”

A standout in the movie “20 Feet From Stardom,” Fischer has proven a compatible match for some of the most iconic singers there are, including Tina Turner, Aretha Franklin and the Rolling Stones. So when Browne invited her to sing, she knew what to do.

“Usually what I do is down to the person who calls,” she said. “With Jackson, he was so sweet and he sent me this beautiful demo of him singing the song and playing guitar. And that gave me a week to become like a biscuit in the gravy of his music. You have to keep an open mind, because it’s a song that hasn’t been done yet. And he’s such a storyteller that his music shifts every time he tells a different story; this one was about a woman who’s a drummer. We ended up singing it through together — You end up being like wet clay, molding yourself in a way that serves the music.”

Fischer had some solo success before the backup gigs happened, and in 1991 she had a chart hit with a song she wrote (and still performs), “How Can I Ease the Pain.” But around this time she was also given a featured slot with the Stones, and worked with them for the next 20 years. “I guess in my mind I never had direction, I just followed the path. Doing the first Stones tour was crazy, because I’d never been in that setting before — When the energy comes from the crowd to the stage, it feels like thunder roaring in the distance. My natural inclination is to watch the lead singer, with my eyes and my ears — If they’re out of breath, if they’re doing great, how much space to leave them and when to step in.”

She admits it’s a special challenge to sing with a Mick, a Tina or an Aretha. “I try to be a blank canvas — They’ll give me a lyric, and they’ll maybe sing the melody if I’m lucky. I get excited because I never know what body of water I’ll be dropped in, so I put my floaters on and go. You want to be the best always, and you always worry a little bit about disappointing somebody. But the microscope is more focused on you when it’s someone larger than life; you have to talk yourself off the ledge a little bit. But then you realize that they are another creative spirit who wants to do their best.”

At City Winery Saturday, Fischer will be accompanied by pianist Taylor Eigsti. And she’s likely to sing anything from folk songs to pop/soul standards to Stones and Zeppelin covers, even the occasional classical aria. “The movie gave me the opportunity to sing as myself, and with that comes come lovely choices. Because music really is all over the place, right? I love the idea that whenever you’re hungry for something, you can go out into the world and get it; today it might be Mediterranean or Indian food. And the beauty is that you can do whatever your palate wants.”

Does she feel she’s any closer to stardom now than 20 feet? “Good question. I really feel like the audience for me are the stars, you know? So I am only a few feet away from them, and I get to touch everyone with their heart and their smile and their participation.”

“I love that idea of a casket in a muscle car,” she said this week. “I think ‘Funeral’ is the best song I’ve made, I wrote it because the whole idea of funerals is about people dressed in black being very somber, and I want mine to be fun. And here’s a spoiler alert: That’s the last song in the show and the room gets so energetic, it sounds like it was written to be the closer of a concert.”

Of all the pop artists to emerge online during shutdown, Wallice (full name, Wallice Hana Watanabe) is one of the more original, with a sharp lyrical wit and a jazz-informed flair for melody. Now 25, she has been in some corner of show business for most of her life, appearing on the Christmas episode of TV’s “Frasier” when she was four. “That was my first job and I just have vague memories of being on the set. My mom used to be an actress and when I told her I was interested in it he said ‘May as well try’.” She later studied jazz at the New School in New York but left after a year.

“I wanted to study jazz because it’s super technical and all the jazz musicians I know are well versed in music theory. You can maybe hear that in some of the chordal qualities I have, and just barely in my style of singing. But what really made me want to sing was hearing Lana Del Rey’s ‘Video Games’ when I was 14, and then discovering Radiohead. It made me want to make music that would get people feeling the way that I did.”

Many of the people she’s encountered in New York and L.A. have turned up in her songs. The song “90s American Superstar” includes the putdown line “Stop being so dramatic, you just got dropped from Atlantic”– a line that should resonate with a few Boston bands who were on that record label. “I do know someone who was dropped from Atlantic, so maybe I was thinking of that subconsciously. But that song really came about when my producer and I went to my grandparents’ house to record. Every night we’d open their drawer of DVD’s — There was ‘Point Break’ and “Dude, Where’s My Car?’ So we’d watch those ‘90s films and try to see how many song titles we could come up with.”

She’s played Boston before as support to Jawni, but the current tour is her first as a headliner. “When I started the tour the suits, as I told them, said it would be cheaper to tour with just me and one other band member, but I didn’t listen– I need a four piece band for that full rock band vibe. That comes from my jazz background; I want to be sure it[s minimal backing tracks and everything sounds like it’s played live. We still need tracks for some things like backing vocals but never the lead; I’m picky about that. I need to feel like it’s really a rock show.”

We’ll warn you in advance: This playlist is pretty heavy on our favorite older-guy rockers — because hey, it’s their day too.

Bruce Springsteen, “Adam Raised a Cain”

The Boss has written plenty of more somber songs about fathers and sons (the mournful “My Father’s House” for starters), but we went with this loud, defiant rocker about inheriting your dad’s fire and fury– and hopefully the keys to his Cadillac too. In the old days, after doing the sexy “Fire’ for the girls, Bruce would play this one for the boys.

Beyonce, “Daddy”

Beyonce is many things, including one of the biggest pop stars in the world– but most of all, it seems she’s a devoted daughter. From her solo debut, “Daddy” may be the most pro-dad song ever written, not least because she sings the word “daddy” a few dozen times. She also makes the wish that her son and her husband will be just like her beloved dad. One of her sweeter and quieter tunes, it’s not one you’re likely to hear when she hits Gillette Stadium in August.

Elvis Costello, “My Three Sons”

Back when Elvis Costello was pegged as an angry young man, you never imagined he’d write a song like this. But on this track from the buried-treasure 2000’s album, “Momofuku,” Costello is more than glad to be an old softie: “I love you more than I can say, I bless the day that you came to be.” Musically it sounds a bit like his classic “Alison,” so it’s a surprise this one fell through the cracks. And yes, Costello does have three sons, including twins with his current partner Diana Kraal.

John Mayer, “Daughters”

This 2004 megahit was the one that pegged Mayer as Mr. Sensitivity for life, in case “Your Body is a Wonderland” left anybody unconvinced. Sounding sexy in his laid-back way, Mayer basically points out that everybody in a family needs to be good to everybody else. If someone told you in 2004 that this guy would eventually join the Dead, you’d think they were crazy.

John Hiatt, “Your Dad Did”

Anyone who wants some hints about how growing up should be done needs to hear Hiatt’s classic late-’80s album, “Bring the Family.” This song’s all about turning into your own dad and realizing how much you love your kids, even when they start acting like kids. Not many songs will enthuse about watching your daughter dump oatmeal on your son’s head.

Neil Young, “Daddy Went Walkin’”

The song’s called “Daddy Went Walkin’,” it’s about Daddy going walkin’ and…Well, that’s about it. Nothing remotely heavy from Neil on this one, just a good-timey tune that puts across how nice it feels when you know that Dad’s around.

The Winstons, “Color Him Father”

This timeless soul nugget from 1969 might have you fooled into thinking that it’s literally about their fathers. But the last verse reveals that they’re singing about the good-hearted guy who stepped in and took care of mom and kids after their real dad got killed in a war. So remember, it’s Stepfather’s Day too.

Mike & the Mechanics, “The Living Years”

Couldn’t have a Father’s Day list without the ultimate dad-themed tearjerker, the biggest hit song about remembering what you didn’t say to your father and wishing that you had. The song came from experience, as both vocalist Paul Carrack and bandleader Mike Rutherford had lost their dads shortly beforehand. A few decades later it’s still guaranteed to put a lump in your throat.

Paul McCartney, “Put It There”

While we’re getting teary, this one also gets us a little choked up. But it’s not really a sad song, just a gentle number about an affectionate thing that his own dad was fond of saying: “Put it there, if it weighs a ton.” Sir Paul’s always been good with those sentimental moments.

Chuck Berry: “Dear Dad”

We’ll close with a song about something that really matters. This lost Chuck classic spends eight verses complaining about the clunky Ford that the son is stuck driving: “It’s now a violation driving under 45. But if I push to 50, this here thing will nosedive!” He politely asks Dad if he could junk the Ford and buy him a new Cadillac instead. And the letter signs off: “Sincerely, your beloved son…Henry Junior Ford!”

They’re touring “Look Long,” the album they released in March 2020. “We had the band tour all planned and ready to go before COVID hit,” Saliers said this week. “A lot of our arrangements have to do with who is producing, and who we invite to play with us at the time. But for us, (playing rock) is the most natural thing in the world; Amy has done punk albums and her main writing instrument is electric guitar. Most people think of us as a folk band, and the acoustic elements are always there– but we’re really more of a mishmosh band. A mishmosh with a little pigeonholing.”

The duo writes nearly all their songs separately, with Saliers often pigeonholed as the more sensitive and Ray as the tougher one. “You can’t really articulate how it works, but we do tend to rub off on each other. Usually Amy writes about whatever she wants, I do the same thing and then we get together and arrange them, and it becomes quite melded. Even on the harder rocking songs which put me in her arena, and vice versa. But Amy is writing more ballads now and I’m writing harder songs than I ever did, so I’d say we inspire and influence each other.”

As always, the songs on the current album take on a variety of personal and social/political issues. Saliers wrote an especially resonant one with “When We Were Writers,” which looks back at the passions of a young wordsmith. “I was thinking back at my college days and how it felt to be sitting in my dorm room writing five songs a day, listening endlessly to Joni Mitchell. So that song is about writing as a metaphor for passions in life. It’s also a bit of a travelogue through relationships, wrecking them and finding your way.”

The more topical songs, she says, are usually written for personal reasons. “We write through the experiences we’ve had with out own activism, whether its queer rights or indigenous communities. A lot of them are very immediate in their emotionality and their critique of what’s going on. Speaking personally, I never think about who the song is going to reach when I’m writing it, we just write about the things that really move us.”

One song they’ll always play is Saliers’ “Closer to Fine,” which remains their biggest mainstream hit. “It’s become a real hootenanny song, every night the audience sings a verse, or whoever opened the show does one. That’s what still makes it fun to play at every single show. Obviously it was a song that landed at the right time, it was the one the record company chose to promote when there were other women with guitars getting signed. I think it’s a good song, maybe not a brilliant song. I’ve written better ones.”

A film about the duo, “It’s Only Life After All,” premiered at Sundance this year and will be in general distribution soon. “(Director) Alexandria Bombach didn’t want to make it a typical biopic, so a lot of it is about our interpersonal struggles. One thing that surprised me was the vulnerability hangover I had. When you reveal that much, you start thinking ‘Whoa, it’s out there now’– but that’s how Amy and I have always been. The other thing the movie did was to increase my love for our fans and our community. I don’t need to watch it again to look at two hours of myself.”

“I’m glad and grateful if people think I’m cool,” Isioma (who is nobinary and uses they/they pronouns) said this week. “It affected me a lot — All of a sudden I have these eyes on me, so I’d better do something about it. I went right from five to five thousand, that’s for sure. The attention motivated me to work harder, but it didn’t affect my personality. I’m still very much who I was when I started, I just know more and am a little wiser.”

To make the new album “Princess Forever,” Isioma investigated a lot of philosophy and music history. “With each project I do, I like to reinvent myself and show a different side. I started conceptualizing this record because I was in love and wanted to create a world out of that. So I started researching about Afro-surrealism and Afro-futurism, and my specific relationship to it. I’m a Nigerian person living in America, who grew up in the ‘burbs for a good chunk of my life. So just living in that world is super trippy– not just experiencing racism and those micro-aggressions, but also the vast cultural difference. That gives you a very specific lens to see through, so I was trying to write my music around that.”

They also did a dive into music history. “I grew up in the internet age, so I always had the world a click away. While making this album I did some research on the OF rock stars and the soul and rhythm and blues pioneers — Chuck Berry, Nina Simone, the Temptations. I was really studying how they wrote their hits, how they got people to move. And Tina Turner, rest in peace, was an icon, so I wanted to get some of her flair in there as well.” But a lot of the music also happened by accident. “Me and the friends I produce the songs with were literally making up the sounds as we went along — ‘What does this do, and what happens when you twist this?’ That was the whole creative process.”

One of their themes harks back at least to Prince’s “1999”– the idea of finding love and having a party while the world’s about to end. “Love is fun but it also hurts, so that’s something I talk about a lot. The world isn’t necessarily ending but it’s certainly messed up, and even if you’re living in the bubble of love you can’t ignore that. So the duality of that goes back to surrealism as well.”

Isioma intends for their music to be inclusive, and a few of the new songs examine gender identity. “That’s especially true on this album which I’d say is very femme, very pink and glittery. I was feeling cute and didn’t see why anyone, especially a mas [masculine] presenting person, shouldn’t be feeling like a princess. So I made a whole album about it.”

The Philadelphia band Mt. Joy is a local favorite; they were one of the first to headline the new MGM Music Hall at the Fenway and will be back there in the fall. Their Boston Calling set promises to be shorter but punchier. “You’re playing in a place where the energy is different,” said frontman Matt Quinn. “You know that people still have a full day of music, so you don’t get too introspective on them. So we put together something that’s high energy, at least for us. When you condense it down to an hour, you can pick out the greatest hits and let it rip.”

A Mt. Joy set can still go anywhere, with their originals flowing into cover tunes. Last year at the Fenway they played a tune by Phish — who are known for covering all sorts of people, but seldom get covered themselves — and snuck in some Pink Floyd as well. “Some people run from that, but we want to feel free to express the music we love. A lot of my favorite music is from the vinyl era, ‘60 and ‘70s rock and roll. We always think about that when we put an album together — ‘Here’s where you’d turn the record over, and this is the first song on side two’.”

Mt. Joy’s recent single “Evergreen” has a witty video starring Creed Bratton of “The Office” fame. “We became friends with him over his music, and we needed someone to play a goofy character. That video is open to interpretation, but to me it’s about a guy n the search for happiness, and he finds it by playing music. I think when I wrote the song I was subconsciously trying to convince my girlfriend and now-wife to join me in this wacky life that I lead.”

The Boston band Summer Cult doesn’t need to put together a special set for Boston Calling: “We feel pretty good about going in and doing what we normally do,” says guitarist Tom McTiernan. What they do is a classic Boston thing: Intense but emotive, guitar-driven rock. “We started out more ‘90s alt rock-inspired. I used to tell people it was Arcade Fire meets the National, even though we never really sounded like that,” offers guitarist Jeff Bielat. Adds drummer Adrian Navarro, “As we grow older we’ve fallen into more of a country music or pop sensibility. We like the guitars and want the melody to paint a nice melody over the top.”

They used the shutdown years to focus on songwriting, releasing three EP’s with a separate album in the works. Navarro wrote many of the lyrics, which stand in contrast to the upbeat guitar sound. Says Navarro, “Knox [bassist/singer Andrew Knox] is great at putting a positive spin on things. And if they start out negative, we try to keep the subject matter a little bit broad. We don’t want all our songs to be ‘I’m lonely, I miss you and you took my dog’.”

Playing Boston Calling will be a new experience for Alisa Amador, a locally based Latin/pop singer who is now building a nationwide following. “I’m familiar with doing festivals, but doing them on this scale is new to me. There’s always an element of my music that is introspective, but the band and I are preparing a set that accents the groove and the flow. I’m trying to create a space where peoples’ hearts can open.”

Amador has been performing since age ten, when she started appearing with her parents’ group Sol y Canto. “I guess I realized I’d be lying to myself if I said I wasn’t a musician. My music is impossible to fit into one box, but I’m realizing that no human can do that. So it’s at the interstice of everything I’ve been exposed to — Latin folk and pop but also American funk and vocal harmony. As cheesy as this sounds, when I write a song I just try to let my heart glide.”

And many of her songs, she admits, come from moments of emotional upheaval. “Once a song is finished I can coexist with whatever has been eating away at me, whether that’s happy or sad, and make sense of this crazy life. A lot of people experience feeling lonely and out of place and needing to hear that they belong, and I want those people to hear my music. I’m also looking for people like me who grew up in a mixed cultural background, and who can use the support. And also, I want people to dance.”

Boston Calling at the Harvard Athletic Complex, May 26-May 28, bostoncalling.com

So it’s no wonder that the Texas-born artist’s latest single is called “I Heart the Internet.” As she explains, “It’s definitely sarcastic, and maybe a coming of age song. I felt during COVID like the internet was giving me a lot of things and taking things away, so I love-slash-hated it.” As for her fast notoriety, “I still don’t really connect with that. I feel grateful and honored certainly, but I feel more connected when I tour with different artists and see their fans showing up.”

Harriette, 23, began putting up recordings after graduating from Parsons School of Design in New York. She later moved to Nashville for a time, and is now based in Brooklyn. She’s currently on tour with the band Joan, and the tour hits the Sinclair tonight. Though she’s done a couple of small tours in the UK, these are the first dates she’s ever played in the US. “I randomly started arranging tours, just booked them and figured out the rest. I have my best friend playing guitar, and am using tracks otherwise. I’d love to be touring with a band but so far I’m on a smaller budget.”

The song that put her across was a dry-humored breakup song, “At Least I’m Pretty,” which came with a witty animated video. She appears live in most of her other vids, which usually find her playing three or four different characters. “Goodbye Texas” found her playing with country music stereotypes, and in “Wednesday” she played the Addams Family character of that name. “I would love to do more acting — That’s on my bucket list, along with doing something with fashion and touring with a band. ‘Goodbye Texas’ was a song I literally wrote while I was driving into Texas. The rest came out when I got a video camera in front of me, it was fun playing with that idea and that genre.”

She’s drawn from breakups for a number of her songs, including “F Married” which finds her grateful than an ex married somebody else. “I think humor plays a pretty big role in the characters I’m playing. That’s the way you can be the most honest; when you’re telling something sad it’s typical for someone to laugh and shrug it off.” Do people she dates expect to have songs written about them? “Yes, and sometimes they can be mean about it. But typically people say to me, ‘I can’t wait to hear about this in a song’. I haven’t heard from the guy in F Married’ but I don’t think I was rude or hurtful there. But I definitely think he knows.”

Harriette says her musical roots are in country, since she grew up with a lot of the Chicks and early Taylor Swift. “But what I really love are people like Julia Jacklin, Mitski and Lana Del Rey. All those indie cool girls.”

During a mini-tour last year, she previewed the album with an elaborate show that broke barriers between her and the audience. The Canadian artist, who performs under her last name only, has since adapted that show to larger venues, and will bring it to the MGM Music Hall on Wednesday.

“I think that as an audience member myself, there’s something about disappearing into your velvet seat,” she said recently. “You arrive to receive something, but it’s up to you how much you’re going to give of yourself. (After the COVID shutdown) I felt more open to doing something that wasn’t expected. People had come through this transformative experience, so it was okay to be a little curious. So the show was an invitation to be delighted, and to check your irony at the door.”

The live show is also tied to the themes of the album, which include her adopting a daughter and losing her father, after the three were locked down together. “I can now say that the record doesn’t carry much of that experience, but the show really did. After the first few shows I would watch the wall drop between me and my ‘holding it together-ness.’ I’d never played a persona onstage but there’s a certain line you don’t cross, and I crossed it. It felt like those nightmares you have about going to school naked. And it felt very much like I was giving my grief a job.”

Though often quiet and subtle, the “Multitudes” album abounds with melodic twists and sonic surprises. Her concept for the album was somewhat abstract. “I was looking for a kind of emotional echo location — something without a lot of distraction or distortion, or any reverb to make it prettier. I knew that I didn’t want drums on most of the songs because I wanted the rhythm to be indicated in the way I sing. I wanted it to sound like a person being stripped of their masks — after that, what’s left? When a person has been bawling and their face is truly bare, there’s no more guile there.”

It was also crucial, she said, that a track called ‘Song for Sad Friends’ ended the album. “We needed to end in a stronger place, a declaration of owning your own place and own story. And friendships are supposed to be containers to actualize that.”

Feist had her brush with pop stardom in 2007, when “1234” because a top 40 single (to date her only one) after figuring in an IPod ad. It’s not an experience she’s anxious to repeat.

“It’s all so long ago now, and all I can remember is how strange it was. I had made a record and it wasn’t like I could identify one song that had more than any of the others– and if I had, it wouldn’t have been that one. So I had to adjust to that happening, rather than feeling like I had a master plan and landed there. So I couldn’t recreate a moment like that — Not that I’d want to, because it wasn’t the most pleasant time. I was just trying to keep the wheels on the road as the car started going 700 times faster. So I lived through that without being blown to bits.”

“The funny thing is that’s the oldest song on the album, I wrote it 20 years ago and it finally found a place in the band,” he says. “So that’s a picture of a much younger man writing about being old and unfashionable and irrelevant  – We did another one called “Sell-By Date’ on the same idea. And the answer is that we are proud and confident in what we do, we have the same intentions, we haven’t mellowed or changed our course. Aside from looking older, there’s no difference in us.”

Though their popularity has been steady at home, in the US they’re known mainly for a string of hits — “I Want You Back,” “Bittersweet,” “Come Anytime” — that were as close as ‘80s radio could go to the sound of ‘60s-style garage rock. At the time the band wore its vintage influences proudly. “Everybody starts out being slavish to their influences to some degree,” Faulkner says. “You end up being more of your own thing and trusting your instincts. You stop needing to say, ‘I know this is a good song because it sounds like something else I like’.”

By the time they first hit America, they’d already been around the block in Australia. “It got interesting, because we became a pop phenomenon at home — and that wasn’t cool with the scene we came from, you weren’t supposed to have a hit. Then in the States we were called an underground band, so that gave us a very cool sort of following.”

The US hits stopped coming around 1989 when they released a single called “Axegrinder,” which featured a much heavier guitar-driven sound — the very sound that was all the rage when the grunge era hit soon afterward. “We’d just done ‘What’s My Scene,’ which turned out to be our biggest hit in America, but that one sounded too ‘80s to us — We had a producer foisted on us who put on those big snare drums, and we swore that would never happen again. So the next album was kind of our pre-grunge album, but we were really just trying to capture how we sounded onstage. And suddenly radio got scared of us; it’s like we’d done something offensive because ‘Axegrinder’ wasn’t a happy pop song. Two years later Nirvana was pronounced acceptable, but when we did it, it was, ‘How dare you!’”

That song isn’t in their current setlist, but they are going deep with singles and album tracks. Their show at the Royale this Saturday has been a long time coming: They were set to come over in 2020, postponed the tour due to COVID, then cancelled it altogether and started fresh.

Prior to that, the band reunited in 2003 after six years apart. “We quit on a high and we were serious about stopping, but four years later I was saying ‘What the hell have we done?’ I was afraid people would think we were like Kiss doing endless farewell tours. But it felt more like we’d kept the band chained in a basement and finally let it out. Right now we’re touring like we haven’t done since the ‘90s — sleeping on the bus a lot, which is challenging for dudes like us.”

Their 2009 hit “How You Like Me Now?” alone was in a dozen TV shows including “Vampire Diaries” and “Entourage,” it also appeared in a slew of sportscasts and was even heard at President Obama’s first victory party. So whenever The Heavy makes an album, including their just-released sixth disc “Amen,” the movie and commercial folks start lining up.

“I do believe that’s because Dan [guitarist Dan Taylor] and I always try to take the songs as far as possible and make them as cinematic as we can,” singer Kelvin Swaby said this week. “That probably attracts music supervisors. Being music fans, the two of us were looking for a big sound when we started the band, and we were always ambitious. We’d be chopping up Doors samples and throwing in bits of Bill Withers and Bo Diddley — anything to make it sound like more than two people {They’ve since added bassist Spencer Page and drummer Chris Ellul). That seems to have been the draw when people started to use our stuff. And it made us lucky in the pandemic, because we were still working when we weren’t out touring.”

Still, they were confident enough to give one of the new album’s first singles a title and chorus lyric that will definitely keep it out of radio and TV. “It was funny to record that one because it sounded so raucous. And we decided well, it is what it is — The label said ‘Did you do a censored version?’ and I said ‘We did not!’”

Swaby’s vocal heroes are gritty singers like Howlin’ Wolf and Tom Waits, and he recalls an epiphany a few years ago when he heard ‘60s garage punks the Sonics. “Someone played their song ‘The Witch’ at a party and I stopped dead and said, ‘What the absolute hell is that?’ Since then we’ve tried to put a garage punk number on each of our records — but if you listen to our soul tracks, there’s some grit in there as well. We may have these wonderful glossy strings, but under that is some real gutter drums.

“My dad played a lot of rock and roll when I was growing up, and I really noticed that Hi Records stuff, singers like Al Green,” he says. “And I love the essence of the old bluesmen, there was this beautiful arrogance in the way they performed. They’d walk around Chicago like the baddest guys in town, because they knew they were.”

Though the band hails from Bath, England, Swaby became a US resident a few years back after marrying a woman from Florida. The Heavy begins its US tour at Brighton Music Hall on Monday, and he treasures their chances to get together and blast.

“We played in England last month and it was so good,” he said. “We hadn’t played the songs together in awhile with all four of us being in the room. When that happens, I find different ways of singing — That’s why it’s absolutely necessary to play in a room together, because the magic happens when you’re all there. It feels like a sermon without bringing in the religion.”

The two women are actually mutual admirers who never met face to face before the first night of the tour, which hits City Winery on Sunday and will feature them as an acoustic duo. They share a Boston-based agent, Gary Marino, who brought the two together after guesting on a podcast that Nelson, who is also a sometime comic and actress, does about the connection between comedy and music.

“We’re internet friends and we haven’t even sung together yet,”Brobst said in a group interview this week. Separately the two have very different styles; Brobst tends to be gentler and more acoustic, while Nelson is more punk-inspired. “It sounds less punk when you strip it down,” Nelson says. “You can play anything with an acoustic guitar and it’s country.”

Adds Brobst, “What we bring to the table as strong women, independent artists and songwriters — that’s where we align. I think Raelyn brings such cool energy. Her songs make you want to tap your foot and dance. She’s got a hell of a personality too, so the part between the songs will be just as much fun.” Says Nelson of Brobst, “She can write songs that sound like hits, I’m so impressed by that. It’s inspiring to me how much closer to the mainstream she is, and she actually wants me to do this tour.”

And yes, they also have drinking songs in common: Nelson wrote the number that the tour is named after, while “Red Wine On My Mind” is one of Brobst’s most popular tunes. “That’s my little red wine drinking anthem. I remember when Chris Stapleton’s ‘Tennessee Whiskey’ was such a big hit and I thought, let’s have some representation for a drink that I love. And girls are allowed to sit there with a drink on the table too.”

Adds Nelson, “We don’t have legalized cannabis in Tennessee, and everybody here is addicted to opioids. So my song is saying, let’s get off the pills and get into some old-fashioned balance and moderation. The coolest thing about me is that my grandfather has been an activist for cannabis, and he can now purchase it himself — well, he doesn’t, but somebody goes and gets it for him.”

Her grandfather is of course synonymous with both country music and cannabis; his name is Willie. “It’s so funny when people say he’s royalty — so am I a princess? I know I’m biased, but I think he’s the closest thing to Jesus on this planet. I don’t know anyone else who can bring the hippies and the rednecks together, everybody loves him. For my own music it’s a help and a hindrance — people will probably check out my songs because they like him, but that doesn’t mean they’re going to like it. But he’s always been super supportive and now I want to be just like him — I want to go on the road and play music with my friends.”

“Playing in a band is something I’ve wanted to do since I was very young,” says singer/guitarist Jay Ferguson, who hits Brighton Music Hall with the band on Wednesday. “Each time we make a record, I still don’t feel that I’ve become cynical about enjoying what I do. There’s a lot of people who turn what they love into their career, and it turns them off to what they loved about it — like people in record companies who have to sit and listen to demo tapes all day, or someone who loves to ski and becomes a ski instructor. We’ve never been like that.”

Sloan’s new album “Steady” doesn’t pass four minutes on any of its 12 tracks, and the hooks keep coming even when the lyrics get mournful. “I think a little restriction is a good thing,” Ferguson says. “With a smaller palette, you’re trying to do something new and creative within a short song that still has some melody to it — tThat’s a fun challenge.” An eternal music fan, he points to a Paul McCartney track, “The Pound is Sinking,” that he reconnected with recently. “It’s only two and a half minutes long, but within that the song has three separate parts, and they all hold together. When you hear something like that, it’s a fun challenge to rise to.”

Ferguson is himself a record collector with a preference for British Invasion-era 45’s, so he relates to the fans with shelves of obscure Sloan records. “I always want to write a song called ‘Collect Yourself,’ because I always dreamed of making records. Back when we first did [their 1993 debut] ‘Smeared’ and got vinyl copies from Europe, that to me was the ultimate — something we created was on a record. Now there are fans coming up to me who have more stuff that I do. And I’ll say, ‘I don’t have that poster, how did you get that’?”

Aside from their longevity, Sloan are unique in that all four members sing lead, write songs and play most instruments; they all develop material on their own before bringing it to the band. They’ve even had one album, 2014’s “Commonwealth,” where each member got one side of a double LP.

“We were kind of built for the pandemic because we don’t get together to record our songs. For me personally, I’m always working at home so it didn’t even make much difference when the pandemic hit. Andrew [drummer Andrew Scott] may play all the instruments on some of his songs. But generally, we try to get everybody to sing on everybody else’s songs, and the vocal blend is often what ties the records together. Plus, our songs tend to have a lot in common — it’s not like somebody’s going to write a metal song or an electronic song. But I’m glad that it didn’t come out sounding like some disparate bunch of pieces we were forcing together.”

When Sloan last toured just before shutdown, they revisited one of their older albums, “Navy Blues” and played it from start to finish. This year they’re playing all of “Steady,” but with two long sets planned there’ll be room for plenty of oldies as well. “We’re spreading the new songs out, so it won’t be a punishing 40 minutes of new material. We’re getting to have some fun with it — basically, we’re opening for ourselves.”

“That’s a coping mechanism I’ve had since I was a kid,” she said by phone this week. “We called it ‘playing the dozens’ when I was a child, and we either cried or laughed. Many people have had children to help escape from the bad things in their life — we’re not psychopaths, we’re just surviving. My comedy became an extension of that I didn’t have a lot of money and couldn’t afford therapy, so that became the place where I could deal.”

Born in Boston, she grew up poor in the Dominican Republic, and was kidnapped twice as a child due to family conflicts. When she began performing, she was living homeless in Hollywood after losing a job and being evicted. By then she’d been writing screenplays for a number of years, and was aiming for a career as a writer. “I’m one of those people that they’d call an introverted extrovert. I spend the majority of my time in near solitude, or in very enclosed spaces. Onstage I get to have that splash, where I get to express my points of view — and then I go back into my shell. I’d say that writers are my people more than anyone.”

She got mainstream attention with a recent HBO special, “Fighting Words,” which includes an emotional reunion with her estranged father. But she’ll come to the City Winery Wednesday with an all-new show, which she’s calling “Don’t @ Me”– a title that reflects her mixed feelings about social media.

“It allows us to point the finger at others without consequence. And you know, I’ve reached the point where I get really tired of people trying to make meaningful statements without any substance behind it. Being out there as an entertainer can wear on you in that way. Sometimes I just don’t want to hear someone’s take on what I said.” She got a taste of that recently, when some of her lines about the gay and transgender communities were criticized out of context (she in fact supports both). “I had a line about my grandmother not understanding pronouns, because she was illiterate. Does that mean we should set her on fire, or would she have the space to grow and learn?”

She’s also delved into her Latin heritage, and turned a few stereotypes on their ear. “Whe I talk about that it’s from the perspective of my own family and the way we dealt with race. You don’t have to like it, but you can’t deny those experiences were true. When I make observational comedy it comes out of my own experiences. If I’m talking about race or gender or LBGT, I have a personal story about them all, and you move forward by confronting those things.”

The one thing that is off limits is cruelty in her humor. “I don’t want to weaponize words toward anyone who is marginalized. There is a joke about blind people in the show, but it’s there because a blind person saw me and said he felt left out. I’m tired of the division and the hatefulness being sown in this country, and I want to be part of the solution.”