Joe Bonamassa’s recently released concert CD, Beacon Theatre: Live From New York, isn’t advertised as a homecoming show, but in a very real sense, it was a return to his beginnings.

Soundtrack albums are usually little more than cheerfully anachronistic artifacts of the unholy alliance between Big Film and Big Music — the major labels used to use them as a roll-of-the-dice jet pack for their prospect acts, hoping that a box-office smash would help launch their prospect band’s fortunes, and for the bands it was usually a safe bet.

If you are a fan of West African Highlife, that most infectious of world music styles, you could travel to Accra, Lagos or Yaounde. Or you could walk over to Grusin Music Hall on the University of Colorado Boulder campus.

The five friends who make up Na’an Stop couldn’t believe they sold out their first headlining show at the Fox Theater last January.

We asked Luke Miller, guitarist and one-half of the brother team that comprises the core of the funktronica quartet Lotus, about the flyer we came across in Cleveland last January, while we were in town visiting family.

To hear Sites tell it, musical schizophrenia is just another day at the office for Whitewater Ramble.

Gasoline Lollipops’ founder Clay Rose is tired of people saying that songwriters should just be themselves. Though this may manifest itself more overtly in his side project where band members dress and act like 1920s zombies, Gasoline Lollipops certainly creates its own enchanted atmosphere. The Boulder musician thinks it’s important to be genuine onstage — but genuine is very different than ordinary.

To an outsider, rehearsals of the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra may seem like chaos — but members insist it’s focused chaos.

Plenty of musicians say the live show is where their music really comes alive and songs can take on a new life, evolving into something different — and often better — than the versions fans are accustomed to hearing on a record.

Put tech nerds, gear expos, independent film buffs and musicians of every conceivable genre into a blender and press mix, pour the resulting slurry into the one city just tolerant enough to put up with it, and you get an approximation of what it’s like to be at South By Southwest (SXSW).