“I’d like to dedicate this next song to my grandmother who passed away in her sleep last night,� said Shadows Fall vocalist Brian Fair last Wednesday night at Ziggy’s as he introduced “The Unknown,� the first single from the band’s just released album Fire From the Sky.

11.39 grams. That’s all the weed that Forsyth County Sheriff’s Deputies turned up when they turned over Wiz Khalifa’s tour bus before his May 1 show at the Lawrence Joel Veterans Memorial Annex.

Chris Thile put his hand to his brow and gazed out past the reserved seats at the MerleFest Watson Stage to acknowledge the thousands out of view who came out for the Punch Brothers’ Saturday night pre-headlining set.

Literally, there’s no universally agreed-upon pronunciation for the California dance machine !!!. chk chk chk is commonly accepted, as is bop bop bop and pow pow pow or any other visceral, onomatopoeic grunt that flows from the qualia of the self repeated three times.

In their few years leading up to their aggravated predation by the music press, there was hardly a festival lineup that didn’t have GLO cast in some tantalizing late night slot.

There’s got to be a moment for every thirtysomething seeing the Red Hot Chili Peppers live when they realize they’re involuntarily channeling the Anthony Kiedis hand jive from the “Give It Away� video.

She also built quite the voracious audience in the near decade between those works. If you blinked when tickets to her March 22 date with the Durham Performing Arts Center went on sale, you very likely missed out; the show was sold out for months prior.

Of all of Bruce Springsteen’s ineradicable contributions to the pop-and-rock canon, his keynote address at South by Southwest last week could ultimately be among his most important. For 50 minutes, the Boss poured out shots from his private stock, gushing about James Brown, about Charlie Rich, about Roy Orbison.

It’s easy to forget that, despite the immense and ever-growing official catalog that Jimi Hendrix left behind, his entire professional career happened in the short span of seven years. Some people spend as much time in undergrad as Hendrix did laying waste to the walls between rock, jazz, country and the blues.

It’s not fair, really, that a guy bedding supermodels in his youth was able to lose himself in a decade-long fog to some rather nasty drugs and come out on the other side able to pick up where he left off. Dando exudes the same charmed, slightly arrogant ambivalence of his days as the Poet King of Generation X.

How many guitarists does it take to pay tribute to possibly the greatest one of all time? How many would you like? We may never know the depths of Jimi Hendrix’s generation-defining talents, but the dozen legendary players who will appear at the tour’s Greensboro stop will offer a cornucopia of interpretations.

It was only a few months ago that the whole idea of a New Edition 30th anniversary reunion tour seemed like a novelty. None of the five original members nor late ’80s recruit Johnny Gill had tendered anything worthwhile in years — decades in some cases.

It’s the little touches that she lends songs that give them personality beyond what he voice or the band can provide. She offered one of her biggest hits early on, “(You Make Me Feel) Like a Natural Woman,” shimmying to its sensual chorus as best as her 69-year-old body would allow her.

It took some coaxing from the unassuming Jeff Mangum before the murmur of voices was mildly audible, and it wasn’t until nearly the end of his set that his hundreds of new back-up vocalists actu

It’s conventional wisdom that the best sights at a concert belongs to the people who buy the tickets. The closer you are, the better the perspective. It’s just an accepted, seldom argued point. Then there’s the case of Future Islands’ vocalist Samuel T. Herring, and spending a moment in his shoes would shoot holes all through that belief.

When keyboardist and long-time O’Jays musical director Dennis “Doc” Williams introduced the Philly Soul titans to the sold-out Durham Performing Arts Center crowd last Sunday by claiming, “Can’t nobody sing a ballad like these brothers,” he forgot to mention that they’re pretty solid in the dance category as well.

“Big Daddy Kane in the house,� soul diva Sharon Jones called out from the stage at a Dap-Kings performance at the Cat’s Cradle back on May 11, 2010.

“I think it fits the mood,� Lucero frontman Ben Nichols said as he announced the band was just about to play “Wasted� for the first time in six months.

Twenty years from now, when classic-rock radio is still on an endless rotation of Steppenwolf and Deep Purple and My Morning Jacket is a nostalgia-fueled arena headliner without a nationwide FM presence, the cold reality of obsolescence might finally dawn upon the rockists of yore.

In a more reasonable world, no one would ever have to closet their love of Hall & Oates. There was a period in the ’90s through the early 2000s when the Philly hit machine went from critical infallibility to purveyors of what Larry David might have called “vanilla bullsh*t” once time’s oppressive grip began to take hold.