Christian/Gospel

About halfway through a Robert Randolph concert, the slide wunderkind kicks his chair back, throws his feet in the air, and starts spinning on it. This is the cue for the rest of the band to go into double time, and--if it's 12:01 a.m. on New Year's day--it's the cue for three million females to teeter onstage for the dubious privilege of having champagne sprayed at them. For a brief moment, the 9:30 Club feels like Cancun in mid-March: the jam disintegrates, replaced by awkward, arrhythmic dancing.

Then the ladies evacuate and the Randolphs get back to putting on the best live show in the country.

Another sign that the recession has been going on a lot longer than a month: Two local record stores are going bye-bye. In fact, Open Mind Music -- which moved to Market Street a couple years back in the hopes of staving off extinction -- is already gone, having shuttered its doors last month. (The store will apparently sell its remaining underground hip-hop, freaky techno, and oddball rock at the Other Shop on Divisadero and online.) Now comes the news that the 24th Street location of Streetlight Records is going kaput after the holidays.

The Music Builds Tour, a collaboration between LiveNation, Hollywood for Habitat for Humanity, and the bands (Jars of Clay, Robert Randolph & Co., Switchfoot and Third Day) came to Nissan Pavilion on Sunday, raising cash for local Habitat chapters and bringing some of that New-Time religion to Bristow.

Most went to see Switchfoot and Third Day; I went for Robert Randolph, with whom I've been relatively obsessed since Live at the Wetlands. To say that the gospel-steel messiah stuck out from the Christian rock acts that bookended him would be...something of an understatement. Picture Buddy Guy opening for the Monkees.

Welcome to the new Listen.com, your web hookup to local music scenes. Listen.com was reborn from a very simple premise: putting a world of music lovers in closer touch with what's musically popping in any given town.

Dig it: the Internet has already been instrumental in introducing musicians to fans looking to discover them. Too often though, it's either single-staff websites or single-minded bloggers calling all the shots. One set of biases = one set of recommendations. Don't get us wrong, these people have turned us onto some great tunes, but we figured there's got to be a better way.

Instead, we've gathered some of the best writers and bloggers from every corner of the country and asked them to forget the things happening elsewhere. It's all about what's happening in their own backyards: local shows, local bands and local clubs. For Listen.com, the local scene is life. So the more of scenes we know about (and the more we know about each scene), the more fulfilling our life - and your Listen.com experience - will be.

And we're not going to do it on our own! We'll be adding scenes from around the U.S. - and, hopefully, beyond - as you tell us to. Soon enough, you'll probably be covering your local scene better than we do - and we'll be the ones paying attention. (Go HERE to tell us which scene we should add next!)

So do what you've always done -- listen locally, rant globally. Check out how the new Listen.com does the same. Then tell us what we're doing right and what we're doing wrong.