PLANT PARKING: The Dallas Arboretum will build a six-story parking garage, providing much-needed parking relief for the facility. It”ll be built across the street from the Children”s Garden, which will open in September, providing 1,200 parking spaces. “We need a parking garage, and we need it quickly,” John Armstrong, the arboretum’s vice president of project development, tells dallasnews.com.

LOCAL MUSIC BITS: While in town for Bonnaroo, St. Vincent taped an interview with local station WXRT for its Backstage at Bonnaroo series. (WXRT) … Erykah Badu”s playing a free show July 26 at Prophet Bar. But if you want in, you gotta work for it. () … Preston Jones takes a spin through new local releases by Daniel Markham, Killa MC and Jordan Higginbotham. (dfw.com)

AN EMOTIONAL EXPLORATION: On Friday, Uptown Players opens the musical Songs for a New World. The show features a collection of songs all exploring life”s emotions: risk, fear, hope, dreams, love, etc. There”s no real plot, per se – it”s the themes that pull the show together. So what do you call that? “It’s a theatrical song cycle—a set of songs with a unifying idea performed in sequence as a single entity,” Coy Covington, the show”s director, tells theaterjones.com. “The unifying idea in Songs is that all the numbers center on “what if” moments. Moments where your life has changed and how you choose to deal with this “new world” in which you find yourself. Or in some cases, how you don’t deal with it.”