There was a time years ago, for about five minutes, that I thought I had a handle on music. Granted, the music I loved represented only a tiny fragment of the cultural moment. But I’m an adult now, and that misguided confidence is long gone. In recent years, I’ve been thinking to myself: I could no longer tell you what was happening in music. Not a clue. I couldn’t even answer the narrower question “What’s happening in Texas music?”—the field was still too vast and the task of tackling it on my own was too intimidating.
But the reporter’s solution to every problem is: Report it! I work at a magazine that offered me an opportunity to go call 1,000 people and find some answers. So I sent up a flare.
Starting in October of last year, Texas Monthly writers started sending in ideas. Separately, I started calling around to musicians and club owners and Those Who Know to get a lay of the land. By this spring, when we started putting the package together, the cool artists and scenes we found were so numerous that we couldn’t shoehorn it all into the paper magazine.
This is why you’ll find ten additional items online, where you can also (joy!) hear the music. In this Spotify list, we bring you a set of artists named in the music issue. It’s still just a fragment of a cultural moment, but if you’re like me and wondering what in the world is going on out there, this is a start. And the beautiful thing is: There’s always more to come.
