One of the fun things about surveying music by year after the fact is seeing which artists carried on to greater fame. In some cases, they are not who you’d expect. When I first heard Calvin Harris’ It Was Acceptable In The Eighties, I thought it was a silly song. Then I happened to be […]
2006 was the year we discovered that turning your back on the real world only gets you so far. Some of us travelled aimlessly. Others paired up. Politics was pointless so we ignored it. And then there was the music–ironic, alienated, a little sad. Amy Winehouse released Back To Black that year — we played […]
On March 23, we played all the songs from 2005 that we didn’t play last week plus assorted funky tunesters (Michael, Janet, Evelyn “Champagne” King). This made for what my mother calls a mish-mash, and what’s worse, I can’t really vouch for the authenticity of this playlist because of all the cross-outs… If I had […]
2005 was a year of resignation for many of us. It was a time to turn away from politics and get on with whatever we found important in life. There was a resurgence of love songs. Others pondered the bigger questions of life, the universe, and everything. For me, 2005 was definitely a drop-out year. […]
As we struggled to figure out how to program our radio show, Bubble Wrap, we decided to focus on the indie music of the 2000s, starting with the first year for which I had a lot of music, which was 2004. To put 2004 in context, it was the fourth freaking year of the Bush […]
It was March the second, and we had just emerged from our caves after two weeks with influenza (we assume that’s what it was — we certainly felt awful enough). The day before, Bernie had lost Nevada and somehow, that seemed like the end of the world to me. So we took off on a […]
Bubble Wrap is a new show on WVEW-LP in Brattleboro, VT, our local community radio station. I’m co-host with my partner CG, and together we dish up what the program guide calls “an amalgamation of indie pop, rock, and funk.” This enables us to play all the eras and genres of music that we like, […]
The beauty of the Future as a venue is its obscurity and its diversity. The space is small, intimate, so intimate that sometimes it freaks you out a little. Bands routinely try to chat up the audience just to break the weird tension that arises when you’re setting up with people four feet away, just […]
The Future Collective keep bringing us great music. Their latest show featured The Suitcase Junket, a one-man band led by Matt Lorenz, a Vermonter now living in Amherst who’s already getting airplay on The River. In addition to having an amazing voice and top notch songs, in a quirky folk vein, he also knows how […]
The other night, I happened to be listening to Pan Voyevoda by Rimsky-Korsakov when, to my surprise, out popped the Simpsons theme song. Not literally, but the theme R-K used to open his suite is the same, almost note for note, as the theme to the Simpsons. It’s slower, to be sure, and unsyncopated, but […]
For the last year (2013 inclusive), I did nothing but complain about new music. Then I discovered The Future Collective, an arts and music organization in my very own town of Brattleboro, VT. Crazy how these things turn out — that just as I had despaired of finding happening music outside a big city, a […]
A while back I heard that Kim’s in NYC was closing. It felt like another sad sign of the times, as music in a format you can touch and own went the way of all things digitizable. Fortunately, it wasn’t completely true. Kim’s Music didn’t disappear but its main location did close, leaving only one […]