We were looking forward to doing the Bubble Wrap show the day after the election, figuring Hillary would win and we could play upbeat pop songs with just a touch of whimsical sarcasm…. And then the unthinkable happened — Donald Trump won! How is this even possible. On one days notice it was back to […]
Since the election was all anyone was thinking about anyway, we decided to provide some musical encouragement on Bubble Wrap this week. But we threw in someunrelated new stuff too, just to keep it interesting. First off, apologies in advance to purists who think Bruno Mars is too pop for an indie show. I agree. […]
Doing a Hallowe’en show on the radio is always fun — it brings out your inner ham and suddenly you’re playing sound effects records of haunted mansions and wishing you had Monster Mash on your iPad… This year’s Bubble Wrap Halloween playlist consisted of two types of Halloween song. There are the songs that are […]
There are weeks when we’re less inspired by the Bubble Wrap playlist options than others, but we always try to put together a good mix of old and new, warped and accessible, or at least entertaining… This week, we dug back in the archives for forgotten gems like “Man in the House” by Greenskeeper and […]
It’s hard to do a radio show in a vacuum, which is why this autumn’s media mayhem is great for sparking interesting musical choices. The interesting new artist of this week’s Bubble Wrap show was Chicago Farmer, aka Cody Dickoff (pronounced Dee-cough! — you can see why he calls himself Chicago Farmer.) The record, Midwest […]
This week on Bubble Wrap we focused on new music again with no particular theme in mind. There were a few chestnuts in there — accordion virtuoso Brent Buswell’s Pennsylvania Polka provided a rousing opening. In honor of hurricane Matthew, we tossed in Hurricane by Crooked Fingers, a perennial favorite of mine. We enjoyed a […]
No theme, no thought, just raw, unravelled rock and pop, also hip hop, spoken word, and a show tune, Bubble Wrap is past redemption, and we don’t care! Playlist below. September 28, 2016 The Way We Play Grandmaster Flash – The Adventures of GMF on the Wheels of Steel * Dirty Projectors with Bjork – […]
There were more police killings of black men this week, including Keith Scott and Terence Crutcher, bringing a sense of frustration and grief that can’t go away because they don’t stop happening… This week’s Bubble Wrap show featured lots of funk, r&b, hip hop, and even some disco (imagine that), mostly addressing the black experience, […]
Our discovery this week was The 1975. We’re sorry we didn’t bother to listen to them sooner. Despite occasionally sounding like a boy band, there’s an undercurrent of coolness to their ultra-pop. “Love Me,” the track we played, is killer dance pop. Hard not to like. Ditto for Angel Olsen whose My Woman album seems […]
On Bubble Wrap this week, we realized once again why sets of one person’s musical selections alternating with another person’s selections leads to chaos, both aurally and emotionally. Just when you’re ready to get out the bourbon, a comedy number comes on. Next we’re making you get your dancing shoes on, then we’re telling you […]
Composer, musician, and brother Bill LePage joined us on June 22 for a different sort of Bubble Wrap show, taking the concept of independent music far from the bounds to which the term is usually applied. Playing everything from Pogo to Ravel, Bill approached the sounds of the 20th century in a genre-agnostic way, mixing […]
Considering that we practically live in their backyard, it’s surprising that we never noticed Signature Sounds Recordings until now. Signature Sounds is a label out of Northampton, Massachusetts, originally focused on folk, Americana, and singer-songwriter music, and more recently branching out into rock and indie. Folk is not usually my thing but recently I discovered […]
Usually our Bubble Wrap shows are an assortment of tracks from near to far and then to now, but recently whole chunks of related music have been falling into our laps, and this week, we decided to showcase some of it. It gave us a chance to acquaint people and ourselves with indie labels and […]