For The Record- 04. May. 2024

I never heard you tell me "baby, you're free"

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Welcome to another edition of For The Record, the weekly newsletter that brings the world of music news straight to your inbox. Part essay, part good old-fashioned link drop, this is a benefit for paid supporters of On Repeat.

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This week, we’ve got news on a May 4th holiday, The Mountain Goats, and Marty Stuart

All that and a LOT more, including Joni Mitchell, Sirius XM, Fishbone, and Superchunk.

Let’s get to it!

📻📻📻

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For a good chunk of 2020 & 2021, my family took 2–3 vacations a week. We didn’t get on an airplane (though I work for an airline), and we didn’t cross any time zones. Heck, we didn’t even get in the car.

We got on our bikes.

When planning a vacation, people look to the usual high-profile places; New York City, San Francisco, etc. Some will venture abroad, while others will hit Disney and the Florida coasts. I’m not saying anything new when I say that COVID changed that calculus for most of the world.

Madison is a small town in a small space that punches well above its weight. There is an abundance of restaurants for every taste, plenty of culture, and natural beauty at every turn (it is right between two lakes, after all). If that wasn’t enough, it’s also home to the University of Wisconsin.

All of that is true, and all of those are excellent reasons to visit. But for the most part, none of it was enough to stop us from letting day-to-day life get in the way of experiencing it.

It took a pandemic, but we finally got out and saw the city we’ve called home for (at the time) 15 years. Some of the places we went, we’ve driven by 100’s of times but never really gone to. Others were old favorites made new.

When we travel, we tend to have lofty expectations. Even experienced travelers have a high bar. That’s why trips sometimes seem to fall flat. Sure, they might’ve been fun, but they aren’t always the mind-blowing experience we hope they’ll be.

In our case, we didn’t just have low expectations; we didn’t have any expectations. And really, what else were we going to do with our time? Some days we had a vague goal, like “let’s make it out to XXX,” but for most trips, the only determinant was what direction to go out of our driveway.

Something funny happens in the absence of expectations; magic and novelty.

When you aren’t hoping for much, everything is great.