Through a bluegrass career spanning nearly four decades, Tim O’Brien has played on many stages and with numerous players, but RockyGrass holds a special place in his heart. Hell, he’s performed there 28 times, which is why organizers asked him to fill the final slot of the festival’s 40th year.

It’s a testament to the playwright, cast and director of the Colorado Shakespeare Festival’s Noises Off that something as subtle as a missed stage direction can become a hilarious running joke in a play.

The first 15 minutes of Kirby Dick’s new documentary, The Invisible War, contain a staggering opening salvo. First, the jab, a statistic: “20 percent of servicewomen have been sexually assaulted while serving.” Then the cross, a devastating montage of 12 victims, from all different branches of the military, each describing how they were raped. Some look at the camera, some look off-screen, some stare vacantly into nothing.

Wilco is a chameleon band. The group’s sound has changed dramatically in the 17 years since the release of its first E.P., A.M. Anchored by guitarist and songwriter Jeff Tweedy, Wilco bridges country, rock and alternative genres with grace and ease, and the once-obscure band is now one of the most successful and famous indie rock acts in the country.

Scott Lininger relishes the feeling he gets when he supports someone’s creative project on the crowdfunding website Kickstarter, one of many online platforms that allows people to pool small amounts of money with others across the country to fund a stranger’s idea.

Deep in the back room of the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art (BMoCA), an enormous Cheeto, roughly four feet long and made up of thousands of real Cheetos, dangles from the ceiling like dead flesh in a meat locker. Up close, the individual Cheetos have a sticky glaze on them, as if someone put them in her mouth in order to stick them on the form beneath, and loud crunching noises coming from speakers inside the oversized snack echo throughout the room.

The Fox’s closing rekindles a conversation Boulder musicians and promoters often have with each other, and that is the lack of venues in Boulder. The Fox and the Boulder Theater — and Chautauqua Auditorium and Macky Auditorium, to a degree — keep a steady influx of national acts coming through town, but there is a distinct lack of a 100- to 200-person venue in town where local acts can stretch their wings and start developing an audience.

The band (which at this point consisted of Emmitt, Herman, Vann, accordion player Gerry Cavagnaro, drummer Michael Wooten and bassist Rob Galloway) plays the cover pretty faithfully for the first couple of verses. Then, suddenly, the drums cut out and Herman starts a spoken-word creed filled with local imagery, delivering a tale of.

One of Emma Goldman's speeches supposedly inspired the assassination of President William McKinley. What better subject for a musical?

As Communikey approaches its fifth year as a festival and its eighth year as an organization, founder, creative and managing director Kate Lesta is in disbelief over how the electronic music scene has changed in the past decade.