2025 Musical Year in Review
Concerts
If this turns out to be our last year seeing concerts in bulk, at least we made it a good one. I wasn’t sure that was going to be the case, the concert year started very slowly but a late surge of shows (and very good weather) carried us over the line. We saw 18 concerts, just a bit fewer than usual, and I think we enjoyed every one of them.
One of the highlights was seeing Marisa Anderson and Hayden Pedigo on back-to-back nights. They are both among my favorite acoustic guitarists whom I’ve long wanted to see. (Pedigo’s Letting Go is one of my most frequently posted videos.) They both played in intimate venues to attentive and appreciative audiences and were mesmerizing. I was not the only person who attended both shows - waiting in line to buy a T-shirt at the Hayden show, there were other people in line talking about the Marisa show. What a treat to see them both.
Everyone Orchestra was a completely different experience. I was so pumped after the show that I wrote a review at the time. I won’t reprise it here but I will say even above the magic that is an Everyone Orchestra show, my take-away memory was the sound and soul of the vocalist, Kanika Moore, as she fit words to notes improvising melody along with the band.
We saw three shows at Dazzle, each special in its own way. We went to the first, Matt Smiley, with a friend and his date. We were pleasantly surprised when Brianna Harris came out and played sax in his band. We know Brianna from several musical contexts and always enjoy her work. I don’t generally stalk musicians but we’ve gotten to know Brianna over the years and it was cool to be able to introduce her to my friend and his date. We also got to do that with Matt Butler at the Everyone Orchestra Show. I guess that means that we won the year!
The second show was Tres Guitar Amigos featuring El Javi. He is a local musician who I’d been wanting to see for a while. He plays Spanish style guitar and that was another show that was just mesmerizing.
The final show, and the final show we will see in Colorado was Otis Taylor. Otis is a Denver legend, a graduate of Manual High School (60 years later - there’s a story behind that), and a world-renowned blues player. If this closes the book on our Colorado concert experience, it was only fitting to end it on such a high local note.
Speaking of final shows, we also saw what we expect to be our last Red Rocks concert. My first real concert was a Red Rocks show (Boz Scaggs in 1978) and Melissa and I have both seen so many great acts there since - The Grateful Dead, CSNY, James Taylor, Paul Simon, Van Morrison, Stevie Wonder, Miles Davis, R.E.M., and The Allman Brothers just to name a few. Blues Traveler has done a yearly 4th of July show for many years. We’d long meant to see one but didn’t manage it until this year. The show was rollicking and was a great way to say goodbye to our favorite venue.
The best thing about this year? We didn’t see a single Grateful Dead cover band unless you consider Holly Bowling a cover band and I don’t. I’m sure we will end up seeing some as we explore the music scene in Maryland but I am quite over hearing the same songs over and over again from one band after another. (Won’t anybody do New Potato Caboose?)
It’s not just Grateful Dead cover bands we were avoiding. Of the 18 shows, 10 were acts we’d never seen before, 3 were acts we’d only seen once before, and one was the KUVO Live at the Vineyards, a showcase with different acts every year. Of the acts we regularly see, we only saw Elephant Revival and Rising Appalachia at the Mission Ballroom and Holly Bowling. I can’t imagine we will stop seeing Holly when we get the chance.
One of the acts was from the 60s, two from the 70s, one from the 90s. Otherwise, all the others are from this century. Seven of the shows were solo performances - a theme I will explore below. Four of the shows fall loosely into the jamband genre (and Rose City Band should). We saw three shows at Dazzle but only one qualified as jazz. Aside from the two acoustic guitarists, Marisa Anderson and Hayden Pedigo, Nils Frahm is probably the performer my friends are least familiar with.
Artists
It was a strange year listening to music. Back in the heyday of peer-to-peer file sharing (Napster and Gnutella), I had downloaded thousands of albums which I spent years burning onto cds. I knew I was not going to move all those CDs (and didn’t even want them filling up my hard drives) so I have spent most of the past couple of years listening to all of it on Spotify to see whether there was anything I wanted to favorite. This totally skewed what I listened to, instead of finding new music, I mostly rediscovered old.
My musical tastes have changed a lot over the years. At the time I was downloading music, I was listening to a lot of 60s psychedelic and garage rock. That’s why my Last.fm charts still have artists like Bubble Puppy, Tomorrow, and The West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band among my top 10 of all-time listens. Many of these artists and albums were so obscure, they were not even available on streaming platforms. I was also listening to a lot of post-rock and harder-edged psychedelic rock.
These days, I’m listening to a lot of solo instrumentalists (mostly guitar and piano), acoustic oriented genres like indie-folk and alt-country, and an increasing amount of straight ahead jazz. I’m sure that change is influenced by age, I suspect most people move along towards more organic and atmospheric music as they get older - at least those who still actively listen to music and aren’t stuck in the cage of artists they listened to when they were 20 +/- 5.
(A bit of data, my top genres on Spotify over the past 6 months as and after I completed “the big cull” are: alt-country, jazz, psychedelic rock, progressive rock, baroque pop, nu-jazz, indie jazz, Americana, folk, space-rock, While there are still psychedelic and space rock bands I like, I would expect those genres to fade even more as time goes by.)
Looking at my “charts” over the past 6-12 months, there aren’t any artists that stand out as being new discoveries. Perhaps the closest is The Waterboys. I had bought Fisherman’s Blues when it first came out but listening to cds was still complicated for me at the time so it pretty much just got “added to the box”. This year, I did a couple of deep dives into their music and discovered a band I really love. They will continue to be on my regular rotation.
Platforms
When Melissa bought her car from her dad, the Bluetooth did not work reliably to play music. So, she signed up for SiriusXM. As a music service, it’s fine for driving around town. Most of the channels are “hits” of time periods or genres or artist deep dives. In other words, each channel plays the same old thing over and over. Not horrible for fifteen minute stretches driving around town but I couldn’t imagine listening to it for the long cross-country drive ahead of us. Spotify, on the other hand, gives you the tyranny of choice - having to select music hour after hour. That’s why so many people just default to “the algorithm”. I hate the algorithm.
What I really want is radio stations that play the kinds of music I like but with cuts new enough or deep enough to be new to my ears. Fortunately, I had discovered, through my Sonos service, a service, TuneIn, that lets you listen to tens of thousands terrestrial and internet radio stations. Selecting a “playlist” of stations for the drive, I have discovered a number of stations I really like. Here’s looking at you WKZE of the upper Hudson Valley!
Maryland
This essay began with “If this was our last year seeing concerts in bulk” because I am afraid it will be. In January, we are moving from the Denver metro area to the DMV (DC/Maryland/Virginia) and I believe we are not going to have either the availability of shows we would be interested in seeing nor the ability to see many of the shows we would be interested in seeing. It is going to leave an empty space that will be hard to fill.
Denver is one of the premier music cities in America. There are over 20 music venues within 30 minutes of our house where we have at one point or another regularly seen concerts - and that does not include stadiums or arenas at the top end, or restaurants or bars that have music at the bottom. It doesn’t include the batch of venues 45 to 60 minutes away. And this is just a count of venues that play music WE like - it doesn’t include all the venues specializing in other kinds of music.
The DMV simply doesn’t have any place with that concentration of venues and most of the venues that do exist don’t feature the kind of music we listen to. Even the few venues we could go to are mostly too difficult for us to get to. They are further away and mostly in downtown areas of Washington DC or Baltimore. I no longer drive and I expect driving in Maryland to be a challenge for Melissa. The venues are further away than we are used to and ride-share may be prohibitively expensive. There are simply not many bands I’m going to be willing to pay an extra couple of hundred dollars to see.
As we’ve gotten older, we’ve also become more particular in the kinds of venues we are willing to go to. Neither of us are capable of standing for the duration of a show so seats are required. Nor are we capable of staying awake past 11:00 or 11:30. Fortunately, as my musical tastes have changed, so too has the mix of venues where we now see shows. Unfortunately, there are many fewer of these kinds of venues in Maryland.
Some people tell me that we will surely find places when we get there. My friends who know me well will know I have done my research well because that’s what I do. As far as I can tell, there are only five venues where we are likely to see concerts, only two of which are indoors - The Barns at Wolf Trap and The Music Center at The Strathmore. And, even The Wolf Trap is 45 minutes away.
Even the restaurant and bar music scene seems to be weak. And jambands are non-existent in our part of Maryland. How do I know? Yes, I’ve done my research but there is also that weekly post to the DMV jamband Facebook group listing all the shows at all the venues in the DMV - only a couple of which are anywhere near us.
Who knows, maybe I’m wrong. The community that we are moving to has regular jazz concerts, maybe they will be great. Maybe next year’s review will have a glowing report of our new locale. But, if not, it’s been a really good run and a fitting final year.
