• Cover of forthcoming album from Neil Young & Crazy Horse

One highlight not included in the story is Neil Young’s return to Red Rocks, which was announced just this morning. The Canadian-born Godfather of Americana will be bringing his band Crazy Horse to the legendary venue on Aug. 5 and 6, with Alabama Shakes opening the show. (Read the Indy interview with Shakes frontwoman Brittany Howard here.) Young and Crazy Horse will be releasing Americana, their first album in nine years, on June 5.

The shows are sure to be fast sellouts, so fans will want to be poised for action when tickets go on sale this Friday at 10 a.m. Grab them online at livenation.com or in person at the Fillmore Auditorium.

Meanwhile, Red Rocks has also announced an Aug. 9 date with emo-turned-dubstep overachiever Skrillex, tickets for which go on sale Saturday at 10 a.m.

To celebrate the latter, here’s a video posted just yesterday of Skrillex being reviewed by little kids:

If you didn't manage to get to Get Along's CD release show a few weeks ago at the Black Sheep, you have another chance to catch the Monument duo opening for South African anthem-pop band Civil Twilight tonight at the same venue.

And if you have no idea what I'm talking about, you can read our interview with Get Along here, and watch videos of both bands below.

Doors open 7 p.m. tonight. More info at blacksheeprocks.com.

If the Lollapalooza lineup announced last week wasn't overly exciting — read about it here — this year's newly announced Outside Lands lineup just might make up for it.

Now in its fifth year, San Francisco's Golden Gate Park extravaganza will feature A-list veterans like Stevie Wonder, Neil Young & Crazy Horse, Beck and Metallica, along with Jack White, Fitz & the Tantrums, Die Antwoord, the Kills, Foo Fighters, Sigur Ros, Justice, Norah Jones, Santigold, Big Boi, Grandaddy, Bloc Party, Fran Ferdinand, Amadou & Mariam, The Walkmen, Skrillex, Alabama Shakes, Explosions in the Sky, Tame Impala and Bomba Estereo.

Tickets for the August 10-12 event go on sale 1 p.m. tomorrow, April 19, at sfoutsidelands.com.

Also, don't forget that the second half of Coachella festival is coming up this weekend, and you can watch a lot of it streaming live at youtube.com/coachella.

Meanwhile, let's cue up the clips.

First we have the inevitable promo video for Outside Lands 2012, which for some reason features an M.C. Hammer sketch.

Scroll down further for a clip of Fitz & the Tantrums playing "MoneyGrabber" at this past weekend's Coachella. Note how, at the three-minute mark, the group works the massive crowd into a frenzy. And to think, the former Indy cover subjects were playing the Black Sheep just last summer...

• The Ghost of Tupac at Coachella

But the best of all was last night's appearance of a holographic Tupac, performing onstage at Coachella with Dre and Snoop Dogg, a technical feat that was by turns brilliant, transcendent and creepy.

You can watch the video below, along with a nearly two-hour performance by Radiohead and sets by Pulp (unfortunate Jarvis Cocker vocal in the first song, but it gets better) and fast-rising star Azealia Banks.

And as a bonus, we've also thrown in a non-Coachella performance by holographic J-Pop icon Hatsune Miku, who made her appeared in Indyblog back in 2010. You can revisit that post here.

All in all, it's the next best thing to being there. Just ask Tupac.

• Natalie Merchant will perform with the Colorado Symphony

But on the other hand, it's a lot closer than Lollapalooza (check its lineup here), the setting is beautiful, the venerable acts are virtually all high-quality, and tickets tend to sell out ridiculously fast.

We're talking, of course, about the Denver Botanic Gardens summer concert series, unveiled this week for 2012. It includes a Fourth of July kickoff concert from the B-52s and Squeeze; Natalie Merchant with the Colorado Symphony; Ladysmith Black Mambazo with the Johnny Clegg Band; Shawn Colvin with Loudon Wainwright III; Al Green; Pat Metheny; and plenty more.

For the full schedule and ticket info, go to the venue website here. And if you end up seeing something that piques your interest, I wouldn't recommend waiting too long to stake your claim.

And now, your moment of nostalgia:

Well, now they have, and I'm not seeing Radiohead anywhere in the lot. But you will get the Black Keys, Die Antwoord, Doomtree, Florence + The Machine, Jack White, Nero, Amadou & Mariam, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Bassnectar, the Shins, and Justice. Plus, there'll be reunited versions of Black Sabbath, At The Drive-In and Afghan Whigs.

The venerable Chicago festival runs from Aug. 3-5. If your vision give out a third of the way through the above eye chart, you can get the full lineup at lollapalooza.com or watch the nice little promotional video below:

But before Colorado music fans all fall prey to deep-seated abandonment issues, know that both gigs are being rescheduled. BlackStar, featuring a reunited Mos Def and Talib Kweli, will be at Cervantes' Masterpiece Theatre Ballroom on May 11, while Foxy Shazam is expected to head this way sometime in June.

In the meantime, watch these videos, beginning with a live Fox Shazam clip that's pretty great, even after the band slows it down "for all the ladies and the gay guys."

Yes, the Grammy-winning purveyors of the No. 1 hit "Tha Crossroads" (who also hold the distinction of recording with Biggie Smalls, Tupac and Eazy-E) are on the road and will be playing for a few hundred local fans this Thursday, April 12, at Union Station.

Actually, only two of the original members — Krayzie Bone and Wish Bone — are on the current tour. But given the fact that they’ll be headlining L.A.’s 1,250-capacity House of Blues the following night, that’s still a pretty impressive coup for the Springs.

The show will also feature Dilemma from Mo Thugs, Tech N9ne protege Skatterman, and local hip-hop artists Young Ghost, Adrenaline, Playa Squad, Go Getta and 17Ents.

In the meantime, let's all take a walk down memory lane with the video that answers the musical question, "Is that Eazy-E in your crystal ball, or are you just happy to see me?"

• Kirsten Schopen
• The J. Miller Band

Local Gram Parsons devotees are in luck this week — at least to the degree that people obsessed with a country-rock legend who died at the age of 26 nearly four decades ago are likely to be.

Over the next couple nights, you can go catch two great box-state troubadours who are carrying on in the tradition of the late musician whose Grevious Angel ushered in an era of what he liked to call "cosmic American music".

First, there's Casey James Prestwood & the Burning Angels, who are coming to SouthSide Johnnys tonight (tonight being Thursday). I caught the group opening for Slim Cessna at the Bluebird Theater this past New Year's Eve, and can vouch for the veracity of the claim that Prestwood's croon is "drenched in the honest twang that made Gram Parsons and Hank Williams household names."

And then there's the J. Miller Band's CD release show this Friday at the Lon Chaney Theatre. You can read an interview with Jason Miller in this week's Indy (or online here), where he talks about Parsons' influence and Miller's own pilgrimage to the mystical Joshua Tree National Park in his honor.

In the meantime, here are a few videos to bring you up to speed:

The Huffington Post put up an article this afternoon describing the anticon label co-founder as “a hip-hop legend.”

His image is projected on the sides of buildings in the unsettling new video for his song “DIY.”

And, most importantly for Colorado Springs, he and his Fake Four label-mates will be among the featured performers at the What’s Left birthday bash at Zodiac this evening. (Show info here).

Scroll down to watch the newly released video, which is set in a dystopian future that seems considerably worse than our dystopian present — at least, I think it does — and features a dictator who may or may not intentionally resemble our state governor. (Hickenlooper’s treatment of the Denver occupy movement didn’t sit so well with Sole, who spent a lot of time at the protests.)

After that, scroll down further for a quick clip from an interview conducted last week at Dallas airport, where I ran into the artist waiting for a connecting flight to Austin's SXSW music conference.