Part of the Berklee College of Music's philosophy is to provide an environment where aspiring musicians "learn how to integrate new ideas" and "adapt to changing musical genres," according to the Boston educational institution's Web site.

That line of thinking is reflected in the playing of the Berklee students and alumni who appear on Under the Influence (Heavy Rotation Records), a recently released covers album featuring their versions of songs by The Pixies, Radiohead, R.E.M. and others.

"There's more to Berklee than just jazz," says producer Paul Kolderie, who was approached in late 2010 by Berklee professor Jeff Dorenfeld and his son about participating in the project. "I liked the idea of a radical cover record using students who, for the most part, knew nothing about these bands."

For the seemingly always-on-the-move Rachel Platten, summertime will be a relatively stationary period in which the singer/pianist will roll up her sleeves and get to work on a new studio album.

Then again, Platten could end up making another international project, writing and recording in a variety of far-apart locales — just like she did with her most recent full-length effort, 2011's Be Here (Rock Ridge Music).

With travel and relocation so much a part of her life and career, Platten recently found time to talk about some of the places she's been — not long before hitting the road for a U.S. headlining tour in support of her new EP.

A one-off performance in an intimate casino ballroom gave Ronnie Wood a rare platform to do more than show the full scope of his talent, and why he has been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of two legendary groups.

Even better, with those two bands — The Rolling Stones, whose 50th anniversary tour plans are seemingly grounded; and The Faces, who disbanded in the 1970s but are perpetually rumored to finally forge a reunion with singer Rod Stewart — seemingly on hold, and Wood proving to be in such fine form, this show strongly suggested it's high time one or both of those bands gets on with the show already.

In the years leading up to Moving Up Living Down (Warner Bros.), singer/songwriter Eric Hutchinson has been a man in constant motion: lots of touring, relocating from the Maryland suburbs to New York City and recording the aforementioned album in two countries.

"The biggest inspirations of the album were the cities I visited, the inspiration and rhythms of the people," Hutchinson says.

While in San Francisco, Hutchinson came up with a line that sparked him to write "Watching You Watch Him," the album's first single. It was featured in the season eight premiere of ABC's Grey’s Anatomy, and since late March, the song’s official video has racked up more than 70,000 YouTube views. (Hutchinson's music has done quite well on YouTube in the past: Clips for "OK, It's Alright With Me" and "Rock & Roll" — songs from his last album, Sounds Like This — have surpassed 500,000 and 1.5 million views, respectively.)

Hutchinson checked in prior to the release of Moving Up Living Down and the start of his spring U.S. tour to talk about the new album, his catchy single and other subjects.

In the late 1980s, Jack Petruzzelli and Joan Osborne first crossed paths when they both played the same circuit of blues and R&B clubs in and around New York.

Petruzzelli was working with Barbecue Bob and the Spare Ribs, while Osborne was fronting her own band. And after Osborne broke big as a solo artist with her 1995 big-label debut, Relish, Petruzzelli became a steady presence in Osborne's career, touring, writing and recording with her while also pursuing his other projects.

Their musical partnership has come full circle, Petruzzelli says, with Osborne's latest album, Bring It on Home (Time Life Music), which he co-produced.

"When I first met Joan, we were playing some of the music we had recorded for this [project]," Petruzzelli says. "So it was a lot of fun to revisit that aspect of our careers together, of our relationship together."

Very late one evening in the very late 1980s, my pal Doug and I were dejectedly roaming the Canadian television airwaves when we suddenly chanced upon footage of these two guys playing music out on someone's porch.

Our collective jaws — to say nothing of the remote — immediately dropped.

It seems we'd stumbled upon a movie called Athens, GA: Inside/Out. The two guys playing the incredible music turned out to be Chris "Crow" Smith and, on guitar and vocals, Dexter Romweber. When a graphic across the screen reading Flat Duo Jets eventually appeared, both Doug and I realized, among several other things, that we had a New Favorite Band.

Paul Weller's 11th solo album, Sonik Kicks (Yep Roc), is not so much a departure as it is a potent fusion of musical styles from one of rock's most viable and unpredictable songwriters. On his new album, the ex-Jam and Style Council leader tries to touch as many bases as he can, from punk to soul to techno and beyond, in a bold embrace of sound and fury.

The record-label concept might seem antiquated to a lot of people in this era of digital downloads, but not to singer/guitarist Bobby Hussy, the leader of the Wisconsin-bred garage-rock duo The Hussy.

Hussy the man runs his own label, Kind Turkey, and Hussy the band has released a lot of music in a physical format over a short period of time through a variety of imprints, the latest being Weed Seizure, The Hussy's second album, which arrived earlier this month on Tic Tac Totally Records.

The group's namesake found some time just prior to hitting the road with drummer Heather Sawyer to talk about the new album, song length, the video for the tune "Undefined" and the labels he feels are carrying the torch for garage rock.

She's a little bit folkie, and they're a little bit R&B: Put them together and you have singer/songwriter Erin Ivey backed by the trio known as The Finest Kind.

They had performed together for a few years, and when the time came to make her second solo album, Ivey says recording it with The Finest Kind was a no-brainer. The result was 2011's Broken Gold, and the album generated its share of media praise in her longtime hometown of Austin, Texas, which is also the headquarters for all things SXSW.

"Serving the song" — always easier said than done. And the thought process and second-guessing only intesifies when it's your first full-length album, and you are considering lots of material, and when stylistic continuity is a concern.

These issues and more were running through singer/songwriter Jack Wilson's mind as he set out to make his self-titled debut, now available from Fluff & Gravy Records. With the help of producer and Seattle music scene veteran Alex Kostelnik, the Austin, Texas-based Wilson got on the right track, ultimately following Kostelnik's advice to "let the songs do the talking."

I recently had the pleasure of attending both a concert of Lindsey Buckingham's and even more enjoyably — and quite revealingly — an intimate lecture/performance by the man held in New York City's 92nd Street Y. Both settings, even the former, Buckingham was somehow able to transform into stark, revealing showcases for a single man and his muse.

Or, as he himself explains during Eagle Rock Entertainment's new Songs From the Small Machine: Live in L.A. DVD, "Before there was a band, before there was any commercial success, before there was songwriting, production, there was a young boy listening to his older brother's records and teaching himself to play guitar. I guess as I evolve and mature as an artist, one of the things that I come to appreciate is that you must look for what is essential. You must look for the center. And, for me, it becomes increasingly apparent that that center is, and has been, the guitar."

There's no place like home, but oftentimes a band feels the need to go far, far away in order to get some work done.

That was the case with the Toronto-based sibling trio MENEW, which ventured more than 2,000 miles south to Dockside Studios in Maurice, La., in order to make Wide Awake Hello (RedCore Music Group).

"We wanted to lock ourselves up and just focus with no distractions and write the album in that way," the keyboardist known as Key says. "The South had soul, and we wanted to capture a bit of that with our style of music."

When the U.K.-based band The Dunwells arrived in Memphis, Tenn., last February for the 2011 International Folk Alliance Conference, guitarist Dave Hanson says he and his musical partners had no idea what to expect.

"We were there for three days," Hanson recalls. "At the first show we played, there were about three people watching. Then as the set progressed, the room got fuller and fuller, and at the end of the show, people were [lining up] down the corridor to get a look."

Hanson says each successive Folk Alliance performance by The Dunwells attracted bigger and bigger crowds, culminating with the band's big showcase. That's where Kevin Wommack, the owner of the Playing in Traffic label, saw The Dunwells "and pretty much offered us a deal straight after the show," Hanson adds.

The roots-music Web site No Depression dubbed the group — then officially billed as The Dunwell Brothers Band — as the breakout act of the 2011 conference.

"We went there as an unknown entity in the United States," Hanson says, "and left with some notoriety."

As a young kid in the 1980s, Jason Brewer listened to Bruce Springsteen, Michael Jackson and other stars from MTV's early years.

But later on, when he wanted to perform music, Brewer's inspiration came from the pleasing pop sounds that dominated the radio airwaves back when the AM dial was the best place to hear the hits.

"Someone told me our music sounds like music that was influenced by everything that happened before punk," says Brewer. "And I said, 'I guess you can say we're so unpunk that we're punk.' "

Brewer is the leader of The Explorers Club, a six-piece South Carolina band that proudly follows in the rather sophisticated footsteps of The Grass Roots, The Beach Boys, The Association, Classics IV and Herb Alpert, supplementing its core instrumentation with classy, purposeful horns and smooth, intricate harmonies, plus other stylish touches.