a marathon of shows. what’s a music league? what’s a car thing?
Whether you’re a thorough reader, or someone who just skims this looking for their name, I appreciate the fact that you opened another email from me. If you are tired of monthly interruptions from me, well, the exit door is at the bottom there.
Music League
I follow a couple of Minneapolis music people on Twitter, and one said that they were starting a new Music League game, and were looking for music enthusiasts to play. “What’s that?”, I thought, briefly after I signed up.
Music League is a music-themed voting contest. The host invites players, picks the themes, and starts the first round. The players submit (anonymously, for now) the best song they can imagine, and then a playlist of everyone’s songs shows up. Players then use their votes (and downvotes) to rate the submissions - and that results in points that impact the leader board. There’s comments with the voting, and a chat feature - so you get to know why people chose songs, and you get to tell them why they’re wrong.
For example, the first round in this game was “best song you love that nobody else seems to know about”. The resulting playlist was an amazing list of pretty obscure gems, deeply loved by some serious music fans.
My choice for that list is actually not that obscure: The Amps are a Breeders-Pixies offshoot that also contained a couple of members of Guided By Voices. One of the songs on their (one and only) record was written in collaboration with Robert Pollard.
(Elektra assumed they had an enormous, Last-Splash-level hit on their hands, but there was little demand for it, and it was widely available in cut-out bins almost immediately after its release. The Amps would change their name back to the Breeders shortly thereafter.)
I did OK in that round, but check out all these other amazing songs I’d never heard of (from bands I’d never heard of):
Later rounds, such as “what song do you find inexplicably popular?” and “who’s the worst singer of all time?” have been less fun. I’m not doing great in the competition, but it’s not really about the competition - I’m loving the music discovery and getting to know some people. And it requires that you create a Spotify account (though a free one will do) and you know how I feel about Spotify.
Car Thing
When I went (crawling) back to Spotify, they showed me an ad for Car Thing. Shortly after I placed my order, I wondered “what is that?”
I am trying to cut back on subscriptions (such as SiriusXM) and having streaming music work better in my car would help to that end. Streaming in my car is miserable: my car’s computer has a middling Pandora integration, but I sort of hate it, and Bluetooth and aux-in suck for a couple other reasons.
What I like best about Car Thing is that, as soon as my car starts up, the device finds my phone and starts Spotify - whatever was already playing, picking up where I left off. The “presets” are also great - I’ve got number one set to the NPR News Update podcast, the exact thing you get on the radio, updated every hour. And the screen looks awesome - my car’s (two) computer touch screens don’t touch the resolution and color and experience on Car Thing.
Otherwise, it’s sort of a solution looking for a problem. If you don’t actively hate your car’s Bluetooth integration, Car Thing may not be right for you. And it’s clear it’s the first generation of a product that will evolve over multiple generations of hardware and (let’s hope) software updates. Off the top of my head:
- It doesn’t make a ton of sense that Car Thing doesn’t have an aux out / Bluetooth connection so it can stay connected to your car’s audio system, not your dumb phone. What works works because it offloads the visualization and remote control aspects to Car Thing - but that’s still a compromise.
- And while I’m redesigning it for them, I has sort of assumed that Car Thing would have its own place-in-a-playlist (because maybe you only listen to a couple of podcasts or playlists in the car exclusively).
- It is furthermore silly that preset buttons can’t be set with shuffle on. If I have four radio-style playlist buttons, at least they should be somewhat radio-like?
- I’ve been playing with connecting it via Bluetooth or via aux, and occasionally when I do that it forgets all my presets. But then it remembers them.
- Now that I’ve settled on aux-only, my phone (once) forgot how to route the audio to aux. Restarting Spotify did the trick, but I’m not in the habit of restarting Spotify.
- It seems to emphasize the difficulties of driveway wi-fi - if your phone can only kind of see the network, Spotify and Car Thing just kind of sit there, or (worst) skips wildly ahead of whatever was queued.
- It doesn’t seem to be able to engage Spotify on my phone without bringing the Spotify app to the foreground. Which is annoying when I’m looking up Maps, which I very nearly always am when I’m turning on my car.
- In Bluetooth mode, the voice activation was very dodgy. It never understood me once, not when I stopped the car, not when I turned the music volume down. Voice assist technology isn’t generally great right now, but you don’t want to have a product out that’s sort of way behind that weak average.
But overall, I’m really enjoying having my music in the car, for all the driving I’m doing lately (not a lot).
So Many Shows
Mostly I drove to downtown Minneapolis. I set an ambitious goal for March - six shows - and actually hit it. Rather than review six things you chose not to join me at (unless I saw some of you at some of these shows - hi!), I’ll just list the things I’d Never Seen at Shows Before.
- Genesis Owusu had three backup dancers (of a sort?) onstage - for the first half of the show, in anonymous masks, but then unmasked them after intermission to reveal they were goofy hype men having a blast on stage.
- Clap Your Hands Say Yeah took the volume way down, and seemed surprised when the crowd was more engaged talking to each other than listening to him. He was warm and polite about it, but muttered briefly about how he dealt with this sort of noise levels at the start of his career.
- L’Rain’s band has a guy who runs his saxophone through an amazing set of processors, but he appeared to be unready for his first saxophone queue - he ran offstage and ran back, only to attach something (the reed? The mouthpiece?)
- Mdou Moctar might be the tallest performer I’ve ever seen. He’s certainly the fiercest bare-finger guitarist. (He seemed deeply moved by the crowd response at First Avenue, but he’s heavily indebted to Prince, so I can imagine it being a very meaningful moment.)
- Fenne Lily promised to award her guitar to anyone in the crowd who could guess the identity of the man in the breakup song she sang. She said he was in a big-deal band (“well, at least he thinks that band is a big deal”), but that there were no clues in the song itself, but then also said that she takes incorrect guesses very personally.
- Khruangbin absolutely blew my mind when they started dropping a series of MF DOOM instrumentals in the middle of a medley. It was only for four or eight bars each, but check this out:
A Calendar I Guess
Six shows was, I’ll be honest, physically draining. I don’t sleep great on show nights, and whether I stand or sit, I feel it the next day. April will be a step back - and rather list out everything I’ve heard of or am interested in, I’ll scale back the list here to my top-10 (since it’s clear I’m not going to even half that many shows). But if you see something I might like, let me know. Actual plans are bold.
- April 2 was SASAMI at the Entry. Her “Squeeze” is an amazing rock record that I would recommend to anyone. But on Saturday I was tired and there was NCAA Final Four traffic downtown so I chickened out.
- April 5 is PUP at Fillmore. They are a poppy punk band who attracts a poppy punk crowd, so you won’t find me here. But their new record is good.
- April 6 brings Girl Talk to First Avenue, and I bought tickets to this - only to sell them. (His shows are an insane party, but he seems to be less interested these days in his brilliant career as a copyright-challenging mashup artist.)
- April 7 sees Clutch at First Avenue. I have never seen them before despite really liking their self-aware blues-metal over the past 28 years. (I may cross over during that show to see OKnice at the Entry. He is funny on Twitter sometimes.)
- April 8 is Altin Gün at Varsity. They play Turkish psych folk rock. They are from Amsterdam. They sound awesome.
- April 9 is JoJo at First Avenue. Hey, don’t leave. She was the youngest artist ever (13!) to be #1 on the top 40 in 2003. Record label issues really derailed what should have been a remarkable R&B/pop career.
- April 15 has Snail Mail, who has two solid records that have been a little hard for me to stick with. That’s First Avenue.
- April 22 it’s Royal Blood’s turn at First Avenue. I am not sure what this would look like, live, but I assume their low-end sound is going to be punishing. I have no plans for this and it is quite sold out.
- April 29 is another embarrassment of riches as mellow rocker Mild High Club is at Turf Club while pop genius Rina Sawayama is at First Avenue. Who could choose? Well not me because that’s my wedding anniversary so you have fun.
- April 30 Kiss the Tiger does two shows at the Entry. Which means one of them is an early show. Yes, please.
The Palace is booking all kinds of weird and exciting stuff, including Prof, Spoon (twice!), Big Thief, and Charli XCX. Good for all of them, they deserve the love of that larger crowd.