Westin Glass is the drummer for the Thermals and last week when he checked in from North Carolina where he was visiting family, he wanted to talk about friendships. More specifically, he wanted to talk about his relationship with his two band mates.

Whether it’s by design or just a happy accident, the Les Schwab Amphitheater (LSA) concert series has managed to attract some of America’s foremost songwriters and storytellers over the past few years, a line-up that includes Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard on the country side and Beck and Bob Dylan on the pop and folk side with plenty of good natured (classic) rocking in between – think Lynyrd Skynyrd and Steve Miller.

Mat Kearney, the pride of Eugene, Oregon, makes the sort of music that’s perfect for doctors to make out to in hospitals. Not real doctors with their stethoscopes and decades of education and sleep-deprived, stress-laden minds, but rather television doctors. You know, the ones with the sort of good looks that make super models want to vomit more than they normally do and who trade sexual partners like Brian Cashman trades designated hitters.
Of course, we’re talking about Grey’s Anatomy here, the television show that helped launch Kearney into the mainstream, exposing three of his songs, including the smash hit “Breathe In Breathe Out.”

Robert Randolph has never really had a problem getting noticed. Musicians, critics and fans have been raving about him since he was a teenager, playing his pedal steel guitar only in church. While he received plenty of attention, he may have been considered more of a novelty than one of the most promising musicians of his generation.

Now, after going from church to bars to the jam band scene to mainstream popularity, Randolph seems to have truly hit his stride and settled into his own identity with his band’s latest record, We Walk This Road, released earlier this summer. Produced by T Bone Burnett—who could be called the past decade’s producer laureate of American roots music—the record finds Robert Randolph and the Family Band digging deep into the annals of folk and roots with covers of Blind Willie Johnson and Bob Dylan, as well as new takes on tracks from John Lennon and Prince. But the record also showcases, as it should, the fierce talent with which Randolph and his band are so equipped.

Dangermuffin isn’t a radioactive muffin. It also isn’t a dangerous robotic muffin that will aid other rebellious pastries in taking over the world in 2012. Rather, Dangermuffin is a self-proclaimed “Jamericana” band from Folly Beach, South Carolina that is storming the nation for the first time this summer and stopping in for a string of shows in Bend, a town to which they’ve already taken a liking to.

“We were out in Oregon at the beginning of the summer and we did the McMenamins Great Northwest Tour. Bend was the best [stop] by far,” says Dangermuffin frontman Dan Lotti.