Kimya Dawson, Moldy Peach and Juno songwriter, plays Club Europa tonight, along with the band Shellshag. We visited Dawson at her parents’ Westchester home and day-care center in 2002, just as she was launching her solo career and placing the Moldy Peaches on hiatus. “We’re taking some time off,” she said of the band she co-led with Adam Green. “Who knows? It could be five years.” Should we make that…ten?

Tonight, the Allman Brothers Band begins a 15-night stand at the Beacon Theatre, a New York tradition that recurs with uncanny regularity. Are all jam-band fans afflicted with obsessive-compulsive disorder, or just a vast majority? This year’s cluster of shows marks the 40th anniversary of the band’s inception and, using some fuzzy math, the 20th year of the residency. (While the Allman Brothers Band started playing the Beacon Theatre in 1989, Gregg Allman has claimed the residency commenced in 1994.) I interviewed Allman while he was gearing up for the 2005 shows. He talked from his home outside Savannah, with a poodle on his lap. Upon hearing I had never visited his home state, he promoted a visit with the slick eagerness of a travel agent. “Man, you’d love Georgia!” he said. “People are real nice and friendly and kind, the food is killer, and the women are gorgeous. What more could a man ask for?”

Tomorrow night, singer-songwriter Ben Kweller headlines The Town Hall, playing from his new record, Changing Horses. It’s an appropriate setting for his new material, which is no doubt inspired by the legion of folkies who have appeared in this theater over the years. Kweller is a talented artist with his share of admirers. Yet as his star has risen, one of the most interesting aspects of his life has gradually slipped from his biography: In the mid-’90s, when he was 15 years old, his rock band, Radish, found itself at the center of a major-label bidding war; young Kweller himself was the subject of a long profile in The New Yorker. Needless to say, Radish failed to become the Jonas Brothers of its time. Read more »

In this week’s Time Out, Bill Charlap, Loudon Wainwright III, Sharon Jones and other musicians discuss all things Valentine’s Day. Years ago around this time, I polled a different group of artists—ballad songwriters including Diane Warren, Jimmy Jam and the Bergmans—asking each person the same question: What makes a good love song? Nobody had a hard answer, though Warren, the woman behind Cher’s “If I Could Turn Back Time” and Toni Braxton’s “Unbreak My Heart,” conceded that it had something to do with F minor. In any case, here is a link to the article. And for those lonely people looking to deepen their misery, here is a link to the saddest video ever recorded.