This guy, he should carry tissue boxes around with him. It's almost irresponsible to perform with this kind of emotion.

Andrew McMahon of rock band Jack's Mannequin came by Yahoo! to perform some new tracks off his latest album, People and Things. The kid who made his name as lead singer of the piano-driven pop punk band Something Corporate is almost unrecognizable now as a man baring his soul with the best of them. Even compared to earlier Mannequin work, he's dropped the white-knuckled angst for a reflective honesty usually saved for diaries and therapists offices.

I've always said that acoustic versions of whatever hard or upbeat song almost completely changes its meaning and gives greater depth to lyrics. McMahon with just a piano is like watching a film in slow-motion, allowing you grasp every tiny nuance--so revealing you'd think you could see his skeleton.

Watch McMahon play his stripped down versions of "Release Me," "Amy, I," and "My Racing Thoughts." Jack's Mannequin's new

There aren't too many genuine rock stars left in this rock-god-forsaken world of faceless ProTooled popbots. Sure, plenty of aspiring Next Big Things cop the right poses, wear the requisite stylists-supplied hipster threads, or sing about the right clichéd topics. But pitifully few of them have "it"--that elusive, intangible, magical mix of sex, sizzle, style, and substance.

Australia's You Am I have "it," and they've had it for years. It is in fact one of the rock 'n' roll's great all-time injustices that YAI aren't rocking sold-out stadiums in every country on the map on both sides of the equator. While the band has long been an institution since the mid-'90s Down Under--where they've won ARIA Awards (Aussie Grammys), headlined festivals, topped charts, and inspired bands like Silverchair and Jet--worldwide success has frustratingly remained elusive for them. But those in know, including esteemed past tourmates like Oasis, the Strokes, Sloan, Goo Goo Dolls, and Soundgarden, can tell

In anticipation of Feist's upcoming album Metals, I took a deeper look into the Canadian songstress' musical journey--and quite a journey it has been. With countless collaborations and contributions, it's no wonder she has taken a well-deserved break from recording.

What really blew me away was the very first band Feist, neé Leslie Feist, joined back in 1991: An rock/metal group called Placebo--not to be confused with the English band. Thanks to the magic of Youtube here's a video of one of her early shows. I can't begin to express how much I love the metalheads and goths reveling in the audience.

"Someone gave me a microphone--I don't know what they were thinking," Canadian songstress Leslie Feist joked dryly while playing a rare private show at L.A.'s Village Recording Studios on September 1. But Feist, as she is more commonly known, was wrong: The folks at Yahoo! and Starbucks knew exactly what they were doing when they handed her a mic and had her debut five new songs, with her new backing band, for 40 or so very lucky fans.

The performance, which will appear on the Starbucks Digital Network in partnership with Yahoo! on September 19, and on Yahoo! Music October 4, was quite a departure from Feist's more recent L.A. shows, which had taken place at decidedly more cavernous venues like the 18,000-capacity Hollywood Bowl. So it was understandable that she felt little awkward at first in the almost claustrophobically intimate setting, which was so eerily pindrop-silent between songs, she kept encouraging the tiny crowd to behave more like the arena and amphitheater audiences