Winning the Race of the Day
Today for Father’s Day, I was originally doing a coffeehouse DJ set, but they asked for alternative music. When I dug down deep, what they really meant was 90s alternative, which means--I don’t know how alternative became a buzzword. Maybe it was MTV. But as I wrote in the description of the playlist, this is college me sitting around, watching MTV, doing nothing.
Austin, where I live, is a super exciting town now, but as I love to tell people, there used to be not jack going on at all. And I mean nothing. So you would just sit there and listen to music, go down to Waterloo, maybe buy a CD, turn on the radio, or watch Channel 15 Access TV. That was it.
Again, with what seems like this week’s theme, the impact of digging through all these songs has been huge. When the venue gives you Sheryl Crow, John Mayer, and Hootie and the Blowfish as guidance for an alternative set, it is technically true. By today's standards there is certainly nothing alt sounding about.
BUT being able to dig through and parse all this music has been super fun.
Just like yesterday with all the 70s music, I now have this solid-a$$ six-hour playlist that I’m going to pull from, linked here. And I am as excited about today as I was about yesterday. There are crazy amounts of memories wrapped up in these pop alternative classics.
Overall, I feel like I’m building this great living playlist that I’ll be able to add to and subtract from. The first time at it, you get 100 songs in there. Then maybe it changes by one or two songs a week. You add one. You take one away.
But again, it’s not one-and-done work. Now I’ve got it loaded for the future, and it’s shareable, so more often than not, especially if I’ve done my job correctly, people will follow up and ask, “Hey man, can you share this?”
When they ask for your playlist, you have done it correctly. You have won the race of the day.
So I’m looking forward to hopefully winning this race of the day. I’ll do a Monday wrap and let everyone know if I crashed and burned, or if I hit it over the freaking fence this weekend.
But I’m pretty sure I’m gonna hit it over the fence.
Which, incidentally, you can say when you’re DJing, but not so much when you’re performing. If I was doing an acoustic set, I couldn’t take a huge victory lap, because it would be super pompous.
But you can if you’re spinning other people’s music!