Preston Jones

This was always going to be a bittersweet story. A story about four friends, bound together by the act of creation and love for one another, whose creative exploits are a part of Dallas-Fort Worth music history and who had rediscovered their artistic bond in time to mount a potential revival. The time spent somewhat distanced — never fully separated, yet no longer quite as tightly connected — would always be a source of mild regret.

Our relationships to everything — the outside world, each other, ourselves — have been altered with varying degrees of velocity over the last six months. To live through times seized by so much cataclysm is to spend your waking hours reeling from one (often ugly) surprise to another, forever in search of solid ground that feels as though it may never materialize. To then come into contact with such a thing as Fleet Foxes’ Shore is welcome, indeed.

What does it mean to reckon with your legacy? Does confronting a creative achievement — even if it’s the product of decades past, when you were someone else entirely — constitute a form of capitulation, a shrugging acceptance that you’ve peaked and are merely coasting on the fumes of previous brilliance?

It took all of 40 seconds. The woman born Yolanda Quartey, standing before a sold-out Kessler Theater on Sunday night, resplendent in her Afro, clad in a black gown and performing under her musical moniker Yola, glided smoothly into the chorus of her song “Lonely the Night.” As she did, the ecstatic, effortless beauty of her voice — lined with life, rich with feeling — landed like the sweetest knockout punch.

“I’m so happy to be home right now, I can’t even stand it!” Miranda Lambert shouted on Saturday night. Whether in a Stockyards honky-tonk, an Arlington football stadium or a Dallas amphitheater, there is always an intense emotional undercurrent to her hometown shows. It’s no mystery as to why: Lambert hails from Lindale, 90 miles east, and cut her teeth in the state’s bars and clubs before heading off to Nashville and superstardom.

From his childhood, the Grammy-winning singer-songwriter has always been on the lookout for ephemera connecting him to the people, sounds and sensibility of “the truly American art form,” as documentarian Ken Burns described it in “Country Music,” his own sprawling 2019 assessment of the genre. “Way before I became a professional musician, when singers or gospel quartets or bluegrass bands would come to my hometown when I was a kid, I’d ask a musician for a guitar pick or an autograph,” Stuart says.

Robert Ellis wrestles with no less than the very idea of Texas on his latest record. That’s not to make “Texas Piano Man,” the Lake Jackson native’s fifth studio album, sound like some sort of grandiose, navel-gazing exercise. Far from it – by turns tough and tender, funny and forlorn, “Texas Piano Man” is 11 songs through which one of the state’s sharpest songwriters takes listeners on an excursion into the depths of his formidable talents.

Time seemed more slippery than usual this past Friday night at the Majestic Theatre. Standing before a near-capacity audience, Rufus Wainwright, clad in a Western shirt, black jeans and glittering ruby slippers, sang in his ageless voice — rich, resonant and riveting — of youthful hedonism and domestic pleasures, collapsing the years between them.

Dan Auerbach, an electric guitar slung around his neck, stood just to the side of center stage. “Let’s go back to Akron right now, down in the basement, and play some basement music,” he said to the howling audience arrayed before him, glowing phones and overpriced plastic cups of beer held aloft.

As far as rock star entrances go, it was unorthodox. On Monday night at the American Airlines Center, Phil Collins entered leaning heavily on a cane. His feet shuffling steadily forward, the 68-year-old Collins made a beeline for a swivel chair.

Erykah Badu stood, clad in what seemed like a Day-Glo bodysuit adorned with a tangle of various accoutrements, with her back to the audience. Above her, multicolored lights pulsed, and a projection screen displayed a riot of eye-popping images, cycling and spinning and melting into one another.

AT&T Stadium, standing sentinel in an ocean of asphalt in Arlington, was built for one reason: football. The building is, as much as any sports venue can be, a temple to the excess of American consumption, the enduring appeal of a brutally beautiful game and the maniacal passion engendered by the Dallas Cowboys and the team's billionaire owner, Jerry Jones.

A great many musical giants have traversed North Texas thus far in 2015: Billy Joel; Stevie Wonder; the Who; Rush; Neil Diamond. Saturday, the biggest yet - the Rolling Stones - lumbered into AT&T Stadium for its first area gig in almost a decade.