What’s the “Sweetest Thing?” Well, a woman you’re fond of, according to JJ Grey. The second sweetest? Seeing him live in concert, like you can in early August in Fort Smith.

Scanning local concert websites, I came across the following… JJ Grey and Mofro are booked for a show on Aug. 1 at Neumeier’s Rib Room in Fort Smith. The Rib Room’s website confirms the date, although it’s not listed on Grey’s site.

The band from Florida has released several albums, most recently the live album and DVD “Brighter Days.”

Tickets to the 8 p.m. show are $15 and are onsale now.

Crowds gather to watch a band at last year's Block Street Block Party. This year's event takes place Sunday.

Sunday isn’t often a big day for music. But not every weekend is the Block Street Block Party, either.

This Sunday (May 20) is the second such festival, which takes place on Block Avenue in downtown Fayetteville. During the event, dozens of bands will perform on six stages, ranging in genre from kid friendly to indie pop to folk.

You can find a full schedule on the Block Street website, but, in general, the festival runs from 11 a.m. until dark.

Elsewhere, you can find Mountain Sprout at George’s Majestic Lounge tonight (May 18). The Eureka Springs freak-grass band is always entertaining.

Bluesman Tas Cru will be in town this weekend, too, including for a show at 9 p.m. Saturday (May 19) at Legacy Blues.

What will you see this weekend?

The song above is “New Blessings” by Messy Sparkles. Perhaps blessings are headed his direction after a magazine names him one of the Arkansas’ best acts.

Paste magazine’s 50 State Project made a splash across my Facebook feed yesterday — it seem as if all of my musically inclined friends posted this link already.

But in case you haven’t seen it, Paste listed its 12 favorite current bands in Arkansas as part of the ongoing series. Although the bulk of the 12 artists come from Central Arkansas, a few local acts made the cut, including Messy Sparkles, Teenagers and Damn Arkansan.

Here’s the full list.

Congrats to all who were listed.

Rockers Trapt tell you about being “Headstrong.” The group performs Thursday at George’s Majestic Lounge. Caution: The video above contains an instance of rock star language.

Los Angeles rock band Trapt, who have released five studio albums in the past 15 years, will perform Thursday night (May 17) in Fayetteville during a 8 p.m. show at George’s Majestic Lounge. Joining the band in concert will be The Dreaming, which features former Stabbing Westward vocalist Christopher Hall. Tickets are $15 and are available at the club or through www.georgesmajesticlounge.com.

Tickets (rather quietly) went up on Ticketmaster late Sunday night and were available to associates for free. Several who went through the process informed me the ticket-getting procedure was quick and painless, if you were an associate in the know.

As a result, Walmart tells me all tickets for the shows have been claimed and, unlike in years past, the public can’t expect to wait outside Bud Walton and gain access to these concerts.

Something else we learned – Cheap Trick will serve as the opener for Aerosmith on May 30. Carrie Underwood will have a “special guest” but we’re unsure who that will be at this point.

To nonassociates hoping for a chance to see Aerosmith… Sorry.

Nashville, Tenn., songwriter and vocalist Ashley McBryde is making a pass through Arkansas, stopping at several local venues along the way. McBryde last summer released the album “Elsebound.” See her live at 7 p.m. today (May 15) at the Rockin’ Pig Saloon in Eureka Springs, 6 p.m. Wednesday (May 16) at Legacy Blues in Fayetteville or 6 p.m. Thursday (May 17) at JJ’s Grill in Rogers. For details, visit ashleymcbryde.com.

I’m picking up good vibes about the potential Walmart Shareholders’ roster I just compiled. Above, The Beach Boys play “Good Vibrations.” Are they coming to Fayetteville? Maybe. Maybe not.

More than one person has asked me who is playing at the upcoming Walmart Shareholders’ meeting, which takes place June 1 at Bud Walton Arena on the University of Arkansas campus in Fayetteville.

The answer? I don’t know, but I have some ideas.

Walmart’s trend is to bring in artists who have ties to the world’s largest retailer, often as exclusive CD deals or other partnerships. Generally speaking, Walmart brings in several performers for their actual meeting and several more during the week preceding the meeting, which is closed to the public. While you won’t be able to waltz into the Shareholders’ meeting, Walmart has in the past several years allowed the public into the precursors to the actual event, usually on the Tuesday and Wednesday (in this case, May 29-30) before Shareholders.

They always bring in big names, too — last year’s roster for the public included Lady Antebellum and Bob Seger & The Silver Bullet Band.

Here are some prime suspects for 2012, although it’s hard to say which ones might perform before for the public and which will be inside the confines of the Shareholders’ meeting.

• Hank Williams Jr. — Sure, he was just in Fayetteville a few weeks ago, but Walmart primarily books for the national an international crowd, not for us. Plus, he has an exclusive Walmart CD.

• Aerosmith — I made this prediction a couple years ago, too. Walmart has pretty close ties to the ‘American Idol‘ franchise, and with Steven Tyler judging that competition it seems natural that the band might want a tune up before it goes on tour with Cheap Trick a couple weeks after the Walmart dates.

• The ‘Idol’ winner — Every year, Walmart brings in the winner of ‘American Idol’ and there is no reason to think they won’t this year. The competition ends just before the Shareholders’ event, making the timing perfect.

• The Band Perry — Walmart loves country music (previous Shareholder guests include Lady Antebellum, Darius Rucker, Carrie Underwood, Keith Urban and more) and The Band Perry just formed a new anti-hunger campaign with the retailer.

• The Beach Boys — We can dream big, right? Because, remember, money is of no concern to Walmart. As it happens, the Beach Boys are releasing a new album and going on tour. And, wouldn’t you know it? They have an exclusive album, too. However, it should be noted their schedule looks pretty busy on those dates, although Walmart has flown performers in quickly before.

Jeff Tweedy of Wilco. All photos by KEVIN KINDER, NWA Media.

It would be nearly impossible for a crowd to appreciate Wilco any more thoroughly than the one assembled at the Arkansas Music Pavilion did.

And as Wilco proved during their Thursday night (May 10) show at the Fayetteville venue, appreciation is the appropriate response.

There is no wildness, debauchery, crowd surfing or the like at a Wilco show; the Chicago sextet’s fans fall instead into the professorial or aging hipster set, with yours truly squarely among the latter of those subsets. Wilco is aware of this, too. Frontman Jeff Tweedy, on the live Wilco album “Kicking Television,” once humorously commented “Let’s get this party started … with some midtempo rock” before, as promised, playing a midtempo rock song.

Wilco will never inspire headbanging, but they have acquired one of the most loyal fanbases of any touring band in the country. Wilco inspires its own genre of nerd-dom, and when Tweedy and company performed a song that wasn’t from one of their eight studio albums (technically, it was a song by Loose Fur, a Tweedy side project) there were lots of curious glances. “Do you know this song?” asked a University of Arkansas history professor who told me he incorporated the band into his lecture plans. It must be new, said a man in front of me who otherwise knew every lyric to every song. Yes, the cult of Wilco, one that many of my friends refuse to drink the Kool-Aid from, is alive and well, if very specific.

Of course, the band — particularly during a three-guitar-attack-fueled section during the middle of the set — proved why they engender such devotion.

After the shuffling and dreamy “Via Chicago,” the band cranked up the volume with “One Wing” before launching into the four-song bliss of “Black Moon,” “Spiders (Kidsmoke),” “Impossible Germany” and “Born Alone.” Among those, “Impossible Germany,” with Nels Cline on lead guitar, is as beautiful a song as Wilco has offered in their nearly 20-year history.

Nels Cline of Wilco

Those four songs represented four different albums, and Wilco did yeoman’s work in providing something from each of the group’s records. Concentration was given to the Grammy-winning September release “The Whole Love” but an early album, “Being There,” was featured just as often as what many consider to be the band’s best work, “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.”

Wilco would close the first of two encores with one of its most charming and riff-heavy songs, from that album, the lovable and rousing “I’m the Man Who Loves You.” The crowd reached its peak stage of excitement then, which still only means the crowd sang a little louder but mostly kept the enthusiasm contained to the space between chairs directly in front them. I suppose you could dance with wild exuberance to Wilco, but I sure don’t know how and maybe no one else did either.

I have another theory, too. It’s hard to dance when you’re in awe. And plenty of people watching Wilco seemed to be just that — appreciating a band at the prime of its live prowess.

A note about the opener: Didn’t catch any of Purling Hiss’ opening set. Anyone care to share how they were?

Wilco setlist: 1) Misunderstood; 2) Art of Almost; 3) I Might; 4) Company in My Back; 5) War on War; 6) Via Chicago; 7) One Wing; 8) Handshake Drugs; 9) Black Moon; 10) Spiders (Kidsmoke) [arranged as an acoustic number]; 11) Impossible Germany; 12) Born Alone; 13) Laminated Cat [Loose Fur song]; 14) Jesus, Etc.; 15) Hate It Here; 16) Box Full of Letters; 17) Dawned On Me; 18) Shot in the Arm;

Encore: 19) Whole Love; 20) Candyfloss; 21) Heavy Metal Drummer; 22) Walken; 23) I’m the Man Who Loves You;

Encore Two: 24) Red-Eyed and Blue; 25) I Got You (At the End of the Century); 26) Outtasite (Outta Mind)

Tyrannosaurus Chicken

When the weather is this nice, it’s meant to be taken advantage of.

So, how about a whole weekend outdoors?

Gates open at 2 p.m. today (May 11) for the second MusicFest, a fundraising concert that will help disaster victims. Performers include a host of local and regional acts, such as Tyrannosaurus Chicken, above, Chooch and the Sidehill Gougers, Cletus Got Shot and many more. The festival takes place at Hazel Valley Ranch, located 23 miles south of Fayetteville off Hazel Valley Road. Tickets are $25 for music and $10 for camping. For tickets or directions to the festival, visit the event website at www.nwamusicfest.com.

Wanna stay a little closer to home? George’s Majestic Lounge is hosting the Wakarusa DJ Classic tonight. The winner of the multi-city contest will earn a spot at the music festival, which returns to the mountains near Ozark on May 31.

Elsewhere, Stoney LaRue returns to the area for a show on Sunday (May 13) at the Rib Room in Fort Smith. That show begins at 8:30 p.m. Tickets are available online and are $15.

See you at a show or two?

Pat Benatar will fight the ‘Shadows of the Night’ this time around. She performs in August at the Arkansas Music Pavilion.

Hopefully, the weather will cooperate this time around. Pat Benatar, who was rained off the Arkansas Music Pavilion stage midconcert four years ago, has been added to the venue‘s 2012 lineup.

The classic rocker and vocalist behind the songs “Heartbreaker” and “Hit Me With Your Best Shot” will visit on Aug. 19, a Sunday night.

Tickets go on sale at 9 a.m. Friday (May 11) through the Walton Arts Center. Tickets are priced from $27-$102.