Dylan has been touring on his 2020 album, Rough and Rowdy Ways, more or less since it came out. Taking the “long view,” as New York Times critic Jon Pareles put it, the album is a solid base to hold a night’s worth of songs cherry-picked from Dylan’s nearly 40 other albums. Lucinda Williams and the John Doe Folk Trio open. 

Cudi’s Rebel Ragers Tour is of the playing-the-hits variety, and there’s a deep bag to pull from, going back to cuts from his 2009 debut, Man on the Moon: The End of Day, with its iconic title track as well as “Day ’N’ Night” and “Pursuit of Happiness.” The Mr. Rager alter ego came with its follow-up in 2010. Though as much as he’s looking back, Cudi’s latest EP is very much future-focused—expect a few tracks in the setlist from HAVE U BN 2 HEAVEN @ NITE?, which he recorded and released in 10 days this spring, streaming the whole process live on Twitch. 

Pavement has taken a different approach: The indie rockers made five albums in the ’90s and have left their iconoclastic and hugely influential catalog to serve as a beloved artifact of the time. Every decade or so, the group reassembles itself to give the people what they want. This current reunion tour started in 2022, launching slightly delayed 30th-anniversary celebrations. 

Kim Gordon launched a solo music career in her mid-60s. But instead of continuing on with the noise rock sounds she made famous with Sonic Youth, she leaned into a modern, digital brand of rap-punk with help from producer Justin Raisen. PLAY ME, the duo’s third album together, leaps track to track from the edge of trip-hop beats to lazy-fuzzy shoegaze beauty. Sasami, who’s similarly allergic to genre, opens. 

There aren’t many people who can begin their own bios with “Widely considered a feminist icon,” but that’s because most people aren’t. An Ani DiFranco show isn’t so much a concert as it is an event. Just playing through her own ridiculously diverse catalog covers more ground than most festivals—over 20 albums that pull punk, hip-hop, and jazz influences into something you might loosely categorize as alternative folk rock, most of which were released on her own label. This show opens the 2026 installment of PDX Live, the two-week stretch of concerts that take over Pioneer Courthouse Square. Later that week, look out for Muna (August 6), Suki Waterhouse (August 7), and The Hold Steady (August 8). 

Benson Boone is not just the kid who does backflips off of pianos. Sometimes he flips forward. And sometimes he winds up with a gymnastic cartwheel maneuver to build momentum on the ground—probably when there’s no piano handy. Whichever move he picks, he most often wears a glittery onesie while doing it, and he does the trick just before the first chorus of “Beautiful Things,” the song in which he begs God not to take away “the girl He sent my way.” 

Courtney Barnett’s humongously megasuccessful album, Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit, hit 2015 right as millennials realized this whole decision fatigue thing was really going to weigh on us. The Australian indie rocker’s rambled consciousness streams gave a generation’s mundane suffering a charming accent to scream along to. Critics’ refrain is that she’s still doing the same thing, a decade on, while Barnett’s latest LP, Creature of Habit, asserts that she likes the lane she’s carved out—that, or, just like the rest of us, she still can’t figure out what to do with herself. And maybe that’s life? Or at least the life of a rock star? Doug Martsch, the indie rock godfather who’s the only constant member of Built to Spill, is opening for Barnett at this PDX Live show and has been on his own gorgeously strange and winding path for about three times as long. The Breeders and Team Dresch, a couple more bona fide rock bands, are playing the brick steps the night before (August 18). 

Speaking of 2010s nostalgia and doing the same good thing for ever and ever, Indy Sleaze himself James Murphy is playing a duo of Edgefield shows this summer. In his own words, “Never change, never change, never change, never change / Never change, never change, never change.” The one caveat is (of course) that it’s totally fine to change to make someone fall in love with you. 

If you are trying to woo someone, you could also just put on any Daniel Caesar track. Dude is smooth. “Best Part,” the 2017 song he recorded with H.E.R. that won a Grammy, is a good place to start. Though his latest record, 2025’s Son of Spergy, with features from Sampha, Bon Iver, and Blood Orange, does include a song literally titled “Have a Baby (with Me).” 

Vince Staples closes out the PDX Live lineup, bringing his sensation of a new record to town. Cry Baby is about the generational exhaustion of fighting racism, the violence that racism invokes, and the exhaustion of stomaching faux reparations. “Know that behind every smile / they thinkin’ ’bout killing you,” he raps on the single “Blackberry Marmalade.” The video for that song, which YouTube has restricted with an age requirement, is filmed from the perspective of a shooter holding Staples at gunpoint.