So if you're a high school student who would like to get your "Glee" on (only in a much cooler way), here's your chance: Community Chorus Project is looking for a few good singers. A few score good singers, actually.

Local arts entrepreneur Lauren Hodge assembled the initial Community Chorus Project last year, which debuted with fine performances of R.E.M.'s "Everybody Hurts" and Adele's "Rolling in the Deep." Recorded and filmed at Manifold Recording Studio with arrangements by Shana Tucker and The Beast's Eric Hirsh, videos went out far and wide, earning the approval of R.E.M. Now they're looking to do it again in August, this time covering Radiohead, Ben Folds Five, Bruno Mars and others. Members of Lost in the Trees, Megafaun and The Old Ceremony are among the local musicians participating.

If you want in, auditions will be May 12 at UNC-Chapel Hill. For details, go here.

Last Friday brought the annual outdoor music guide, which is always a frustrating endeavor because a few more events invariably pop up after deadline. And here's a biggie in some quarters: For the first time in three years, the Allman Brothers will be back at Walnut Creek. They had been the only act to play the amphitheater every year since it opened in 1991, a streak that ended because of Gregg Allman's 2010 liver transplant. They'll start a new streak on Aug. 4, with Lynyrd Skynyrd also on the bill.

Also new to the schedule is My Morning Jacket, Aug. 26 at the Downtown Raleigh Amphitheater. And here are a couple of concert series to add. First is Duke University's Music in the Gardens, which happens Wednesday (and one Thursday) evenings during June and July. This year's schedule goes like this:

June 6 -- The Beast + Big Band
June 13 -- The Old Ceremony
June 21 -- Dex Romweber & the New Romans
June 27 -- Bombadil
July 11 -- Mandolin Orange
July 18 -- Midtown Dickens with Special Guests
July 25 -- Megafaun

Tickets for the Duke series are $12, or $5 for Duke employees and students (and free for kids 12 and under).

Over in Raleigh, meanwhile, there's Oak City 7, with free shows along the lines of the old "Alive After 5" series. It will be every other Thursday evening between Memorial Day and Labor Day, on Fayetteville Street's City Plaza. And here's the lineup:

May 31 -- Tres Chicas, Antique Firearms, Saints Apollo
June 14 -- Katharine Whalen & Her Fascinators, Balsa Gliders, Nick Autry
June 28 -- I Was Totally Destroying It, Dark Water Rising, TBA
July 12 -- TBA, Chris Hendricks Band, The Broadcast
July 26 -- Annuals, TBA, LiLa
Aug. 9 -- Hobex, Jack the Radio, Paleface
Aug. 23 -- Big Daddy Love, Debonzo Brothers, Archbishops of Blount Street

Levon Helm's death on Thursday hit Greensboro's Laurelyn Dossett especially hard. Dossett had become friendly with the iconic singer/drummer from The Band in recent years, after he covered her song "Anna Lee" on his Grammy-winning 2007 album "Dirt Farmer." Helm introduced Dossett onstage at one of his "Midnight Ramble" shows as "the lady that wrote that beautiful song that sounds 300 years old," and it does sound like an artifact from the mists of time. "Anna Lee" is a song about a dead woman who comes back to her children in their dreams, singing to them -- which seems fitting now.

"I didn't know when I wrote it that I would be remembering Levon in that same way," Dossett said on Thursday. "He gave my little song a big life and I am forever grateful. I didn't know the iconic Levon, just this sweet old man who sang the hell out of my song, welcomed me into his home numerous times and remembered to ask about my daughters and husband. He was curious and full of life. I took Alice Gerrard up there for a gig; they know a lot of people in common but had never met. It was a thrill to listen to them at the kitchen table, telling stories. And then they started singing some old song that they both knew. Amazing."

Dossett will be at the Shakori Hills Grassroots Folk Festival this weekend,  where she'll sing Helm's signature song "The Weight" with Tara Nevins. That song is very much in the air right now. Check out the scene Thursday night at Cat's Cradle, the encore played by Drive-By Truckers and Megafaun.

Most of the Super Bowl's pre-game musical chatter centered on Madonna's halftime show, and her set was fine in a sensory-overload kind of way. But my favorite music during the game actually turned up right before halftime, in a Toyota commercial -- which featured the understated piano fanfare of "Hope You Know," a track on local trio Megafaun's eponymous 2011 album. Here, check it out.

In this age of on-demand micro-niches, the consensus implied by year-end top-10 lists is truly a thing of the past. The very idea of "albums" seems pretty dated, too. And yet good ones are still coming out all the time, albums that hold up as complete listening experiences. Here are the 10 that I found myself returning to most often during 2011, most (but not all) of them far from the charts.

(1) Wilco, "The Whole Love" (dBpm) -- Proof that clean and sober does not necessarily equate to dull. Thanks to Jeff Tweedy's anguished yelp, "The Whole Love" courses with a tension that does not release until the epic closer, "One Sunday Morning," which is as pretty and hopeful as a sunrise.

(2) Bon Iver, "Bon Iver" (Jagjaguwar) -- Who knew that Justin Vernon had a musical crush on Bruce Hornsby? Vernon's second full-length as Bon Iver follows up his debut's rustic folk with the sort of lush synthesizer ambience that was topping the charts 25 years ago, without sounding the least bit musty.

(3) Gillian Welch, "The Harrow & The Harvest" (Acony) -- How Welch and David Rawlings get so much out of so little remains one of the wonders of our time. This is just voice and acoustic guitars, yet it somehow conjures up vast and deep galaxies of feelings and images.

(4) The War on Drugs, "Slave Ambient" (Secretly Canadian) -- Where Bon Iver uses technology to evoke crystalline frigidity, Adam Granduciel conjures up something far warmer with The War on Drugs. "Slave Ambient" sounds like a combination of Bob Dylan and Tangerine Dream, and it's brilliant.

(5) Youth Lagoon, "The Year of Hibernation" (Fat Possum) -- In a similar vein is Youth Lagoon, nom de plume of Trevor Powers, a young man from Idaho who makes dreamy bedroom pop. It sounds impossibly far away until you realize it has wormed its way into your heart.

(6) Black Keys, "El Camino" (Nonesuch) -- Beck hasn't been heard from in a couple of years, but this Ohio garage-rock duo fills in for him admirably. "El Camino" stands as a very tasty junk-culture pastiche that's more pop than blues, but it's still plenty of both.

(7) Megafaun, "Megafaun" (Hometapes) -- So much popular music can seem like a huge dead end. But in the capable hands of this Triangle trio, it's a living, breathing thing on their third album -- a sprawling, weird and wonderful folk-rock concoction.

(8) Wye Oak, "Civilian" (Merge) -- Take the earnestness of revivalist folk, add a bit of electronic texture and guitar wizardry, turn the seriousness way up and add a chewy pop center of catchiness. Presto, you've got the latest from this Baltimore duo. The best album Durham-based Merge Records put out this year, and that's saying something.

(9) Smoke Fairies, "Through Low Light and Trees" (year 7) -- This British twosome is aptly named, in that their music evokes misty mountains cloaked with the forest primeval. You half expect King Arthur himself to come riding up.

(10) Tom Waits, "Bad as Me" (Anti-) -- Waits' albums all sound like he's cut out a small piece of himself and set it to deep, primitive blues. "Bad as Me" is no exception and it's not an easy listen -- but it is an effective one, heavy on the bangs and clangs. There's still no one better at always sounding exactly like himself.

This week brings a couple of very fine show announcements. First up is Bon Iver, the group led by former Raleigh resident Justin Vernon, who will play the Downtown Raleigh Amphitheater with Rosebuds on July 29 -- a bill you could call Friends of Megafaun. Vernon used to play with the three members of Megafaun in DeYarmond Edison (and he was in on their Sounds of the South project last fall); and Megafaun's Brad Cook is a sometime member of Rosebuds as bassist. Tickets go on sale Friday.

Over at Durham Performing Arts Center, meanwhile, Steve Earle has been announced for Sept. 17. Earle played solo and mostly did Townes Van Zandt songs on his last Triangle show. But this time, he'll bring in a band featuring his wife, Allison Moorer. Tickets go on sale June 3.

AUSTIN, Texas -- South By Southwest is enormous, drawing tens of thousands of people to town, and it puts quite a strain on the city's infracstructure. The roads just weren't designed to handle this many vehicles trying to get into downtown all at once, and it doesn't help that there always seems to be some downtown road repair going on here every March. So Thursday commenced with a traffic jam. A big, big traffic jam, big enough to cause delays and missing things. All thoughts I had of catching any of Bob Geldof's keynote speech and press conference vanished in a miles-long column of red taillights. Oh well.

So I wasn't in the best of moods to start out, but I know what to do about that: the time-honored pop-in drill, where you just wander about going into clubs for a couple of songs to see if anything surprising jumps out. No next-big- thing discoveries, but it's always a fun exercise.

It was about lunchtime and I was walking down Fifth Street when I saw the magic sign -- FREE MUSIC FREE FOOD -- so I went on in and availed myself of their spread, downing a quite-passable pork burrito while listening to this mook-metal band with a tattooed woman in fishnets writhing about onstage as she sang. The cilantro was delicious.

At another club around the corner, I learned anew a truism: The band always sounds better from outside. An energetic thrashing was emanating from inside, and it turned out to be coming from a group of kids who all looked to be about 16. Didn't understand a word they sang (er, screamed), but I'm pretty sure they meant it. And like I said, from outside they could've passed for Nirvana. Two doors down from that, I walked in just in time to hear a group concluding their set by putting down their instruments to gather around the microphones in the old-school style, singing acoustic gospel. It was cool.

There was similar mojo later in the evening with our local boys Megafaun, who just flat killed it. They had a tough act to follow, a Minneapolis band called Leisure Birds, who had maybe the oddest-looking frontman I've ever seen. Dude had a thick beard, gimmie cap, denim vest -- and, despite the biker appearance, he sang in a high voice and did this little pixie-ish stomping dance at his keyboard while shaking tambourines and maracas. He even changed tambourines mid-song at one point, which cracked me up; guess he was after a particular tambourine sound. Meanwhile, the guitar-bass-drums underpinning was rock solid as they played sprawling interstellar grooves. It definitely got you to moving.

Megafaun's set was more stripped-down from the last few times I've seen the group, when they had the keyboard-and-laptop array for sound effects, which meant this was more acoustic and straightforward and less improvisational than usual. But it didn't lack a thing, building up an overpowering momentum over as perfect a 35 minutes of music as I've ever seen. There was heartbreakingly beautiful songcraft, a just-right amount of audience-sing-along on "Lazy Suicide," exuberant goofball antics (Brad and Phil Cook were rushing about head-butting each other) and a rousing gospel number led by drummer Joe Westerlund. Even giving a tambourine to the most rhythmically challenged audience member on earth (seriously, even I could've kept the better time than this guy) couldn't slow down their momentum. And "The Fade" was so drop-dead gorgeous and aching, I thought I was gonna cry.

Wish you could've seen it...

ADDENDUM (3/20/11): DeYarmond Edison reunion at SXSW.

I hadn't listened to or even really thought about the late great bluesman Mississippi Fred McDowell in a long, long time -- years, at least. But there must be something in the air because he's come up twice recently in highly favorable ways.

First, McDowell was the star of last month's fantastic "Sounds of the South" live-recording session, with three of his songs on the set list. And now he's the subject of an excellent release by a new label, Devil Down Records, a project that emerged from a class at UNC. For more details, check this story in Sunday's paper.

If you don't already have plans for the next two nights, I'd like to urge you to head over to Hayti in Durham for the "Sounds of the South" live-recording extravaganza with Megafaun and friends. Friday's opening night was truly special. The music was fantastic -- inventive rearrangements of venerable folk and gospel songs, done up as stately jazz and exuberant, house-shaking second-line funk straight out of New Orleans -- and the overall vibe even better.

Megafaun's Phil Cook is a guy who smiles a lot, and he was positively beaming onstage throughout the evening. That sense of joy was contagious. This is obviously a project that means a great deal to its participants, and they did a terrific job bringing this music to life in a new way. Fight the Big Bull and Sharon Van Etten were both extraordinary, and Bon Iver's Justin Vernon was a revelation -- a flat-out monster soul man, startlingly and ridiculously great. Plus they closed with an encore surprise that was very cool; I won't give it away.

I can't wait to hear the recordings. So if you're on the fence, go. You won't regret it. For more on the project, see this preview from Friday's paper.

Onstage at last weekend's Hopscotch Music Festival, Django Haskins of The Old Ceremony spied Megafaun's Brad Cook nodding along in the crowd and gave him a shout-out. "If you don't love Brad Cook," Haskins declared, "that only means you've never met him."

That's one reason why Megafaun is pretty much my favorite local band nowadays. In addition to putting on a live show that's one of the best around, Megafaun's members are kings of the good vibes. Cook, his brother Phil and Joe Westerlund seemed to be everywhere at Hopscotch -- and you always knew you were in the right place when you saw them.

But the biggest reason I love Megafaun is that they're always doing very cool projects, like this weekend's "Sounds of the South" live recording session in Durham. For particulars on that, see the story in Friday's paper.