Conor Oberst, Emmylou Harris, and Randy Newman return to San Francisco's Golden Gate Park for Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, the free, annual outdoor music festival, now in its seventeenth year. The festival welcomes Dan Auerbach for his first appearance at Hellman Hollow, the festival’s home in the park, as well.

Oberst, touring in support of his new album, Salutations, serves as host at the Rooster Stage all day today, for the fourth-annual Conor Oberst Brings Friends for Friday. On the stage are performances from Big Thief, The Felice Brothers, First Aid Kit, and Oberst himself. Oberst remains in San Francisco for the weekend, playing a show at The Fillmore on Saturday.

Emmylou Harris is a Hardly Strictly Bluegrass mainstay, having performed at the festival every year. She plays the Rooster Stage on Sunday afternoon as part of the Lampedusa concerts for refugees, featuring Steve Earle, Patty Griffin, Buddy Miller, and Lucinda Williams, and closes out the Banjo Stage that evening.

Randy Newman returns to Hellman Hollow for an early Sunday afternoon set of songs from his new album, Dark Matter, on the Swan Stage, following his own concert at Napa’s Uptown Theater tonight.

Dan Auerbach makes his Hardly Strictly debut performing songs from his new Easy Eye Sound release, Waiting on a Song, in the final set on the Rooster Stage on Saturday.

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Sam Amidon brings his North American tour with songs from his new album, The Following Mountain, to the Northeast this weekend, playing The Drake in Toronto tonight, Yellow Couch House Show in Pittsburgh on Saturday, and Songbyrd in Washington, DC, on Sunday.

“Everything he does feels explicitly alive and charged by the world around him,” wrote the Chicago Reader’s Peter Margasaksaid ahead of his show there this week. “Amidon is a charming performer and a witty storyteller … [H]is concerts [have] a wonderful air of unpredictability that entertains and beguiles.” The new album, says Margasak, is “superb.”

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Laurie Anderson performs at Golden Bough Theatre in Carmel-by-the-Sea, California, on Saturday, as part of Philip Glass's Days and Nights Festival. Anderson “retains a powerful love and belief in humanity, even after its stories are dismantled,” says the Quietus. Her “imagery and themes are lightly deployed, unobtrusive but perfectly chosen, as subtly telling as a series of haikus.”

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Pianist Jeremy Denk joins the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Xian Zhang, in performing Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 5, “Emperor,” this weekend. They bring the program, which also includes Beethoven’s Overture to The Creatures of Prometheus and Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique, to New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark on Saturday, and Mayo Performing Arts Center in Morristown on Sunday.

The Washington Post has praised Denk for “expressing virtuosity, humor, nostalgia and experimental daring” as well as his “inimitable sensibility … alive to the work’s poetry, wit, impulsiveness and off-beat yet irresistible charm.”

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Tigran Hamasyan launches a European tour, featuring music from his new album, An Ancient Observer, with a performance at the Philological Association of Parnassos in Athens, Greece, on Saturday. DownBeat calls his new album "simply breathtaking."

To mark the start of the tour, Hamasyan released a video giving an inside look at the first leg of his tour following the release of An Ancient Observer earlier this year. You can watch it here.

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Kronos Quartet, in collaboration with composer Danny Clay and chamber ensemble The Living Earth Show, gives the world premiere of Echoes, a multi-media experience of poetry, music, dialogue, and recorded streetscapes, at Herbst Theatre in San Francisco on Saturday.

Echoes is directed and curated by Sean San José, and features music set to the original words of poet-performers from Youth Speaks, a San Francisco–based presenter of Spoken Word performance, education, and youth development programs.

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Chris Thile launches his second season as host of A Prairie Home Companion at the show’s home base at the Fitzgerald Theater in Saint Paul, Minnesota, on Saturday. Joining Thile as special guests for the episode are Chris Stapleton, Julien Baker, and comedian Laurie Kilmartin. Singer / songwriter Emily King joins Thile as his duet partner.

Folks in the US can tune in on their favorite public radio station this weekend, and fans around the world can watch the live broadcast online at prairiehome.org starting at 4:45 PM CT.

Chris Thile's new album, Thanks for Listening, a collection of new studio recordings of ten songs originally written as Songs of the Week on A Prairie Home Companion, is due December 8. Thile manned almost all of the stringed instruments on the album and is joined by guest singers Sarah Jarosz, Gaby Moreno, and Aoife O'Donovan. The album is available to pre-order in the Nonesuch Store with an instant download of the track “Thank You, New York” and an exclusive, autographed print.