It’s noon on a Monday and John Joseph McCaully III, riding in a bus somewhere between Colorado and Washington says, “We’re basically trying not to die.”

The tour bus carrying the 24-year-old McCaully and the rest of his band, Deer Tick, has some sort of exhaust leak, or so says McCaully, who seems hardly worried about any real harm, or so it seems, given that they continue to drive. For a guy who’s been on tour almost continuously for the past five years, vehicular malfunctions like this are probably old hat. The fact that his Americana-tinged rock band’s latest record, Born on Flag Day, has escalated the Providence, R.I. quartet into the national media and onto many a summer festival stages, might also be a reason he’s not too worried. Things seem to be going his way, so who cares about a little exhaust inhalation?

A lot has changed in the past couple of years when it comes to live music in Central Oregon. Venues have opened and closed, we’ve seen our numbers of summer concerts fluctuate and festivals have come and gone. But standing strong (and largely unaltered) amidst all this change has been the Sisters Folk Festival.

Now in its 14th year, Sisters Folk remains a stalwart in the local music landscape. The festival not only takes over the entire town for three days, it has a year-round presence with an education program and a winter concert series. Artistic Director Brad Tisdel says Sisters Folk will likely bring some 2,500 music fans to town this year for a lineup that’s as diverse as any we’ve seen at the festival.

A songwriter himself, as well as a serious music junkie, Tisdel took some time out from festival preparations and the Americana Song Academy (the folk musician’s summer camp that preceeds the fest) to talk about what acts you shouldn’t miss at Sisters Folk. I combined my own list with his to create this Five Acts You Need to See roster:

When I tell Brett Dennen that I think I just may have broken my computer, he’s quiet for a moment, then laughs and says, “Remember the old Nintendo games where you could just pull them out and blow on them? Everybody did that and it seemed like it worked.”

Anyone born this side of the Ford administration knows exactly what Dennen is talking about and probably performed this Nintendo maintenance procedure. Of course, Nintendo has nothing to do with Dennen’s folky pop rock or his recent rise to national fame or his work with kids. And blowing on my computer isn’t going to fix it, but the fact that he wants to talk about old-school Nintendo rather than the fact that the last year has seen him emerge as one of the biggest names in the singer-songwriter genre just might be the reason why people tend to love Brett Dennen.

When Aaron Freeman, better known as Gene Ween, is reached by phone on a recent afternoon, he’s in his native Pennsylvania and driving to rehearse with his band, Ween, and says he can’t talk. Less than an hour later, Mickey Melchiondo, aka Dean Ween, answers his cell phone while at the aforementioned rehearsal. He can talk because, apparently, the practice session is already over.

As far as interviews and the arrangement thereof goes, this is strange, but for Ween, the band that made strange a career, this is probably business as usual. But still, a question remains, what happened to that rehearsal?

Almost nothing about Roger McNamee’s band, Moonalice, is conventional.

For starters, McNamee isn’t your typical rock star—by any means. The guy is a massively successful businessman, holding degrees from Yale and Dartmouth and founding a private equity group, Elevation Partners, that includes a team of high-flying names like, for example, Bono. Also, the fledgling act really isn’t a fledgling act. Moonalice is essentially the Traveling Wilburys of the jam and blues rock world combined with a dude (and his wife) who really wants to be (and can be) in a killer band. With an album produced by roots rock heavyweight T-Bone Burnett and a lineup including people like G.E. Smith (as in G.E. Smith and the Saturday Night Live Band) and Pete Sears (Jefferson Starship, Rod Stewart), Moonalice is playing clubs and bars throughout the country as McNamee attempts to reinvent rock and roll protocol.