It's time for CMJ!

Mid-October has come in like a cool breath of fresh air (indeed) and coming along with it... the CMJ Music Marathon! "Wait, what is that?" you might ask. "No worries, I'll tell you" I reply.

So basically, for five days in October HUNDREDS of bands play at music venues, hotels, stores... all over lower Manhattan. The bands aren't your mainstream bands. CMJ stands for College Music Journal and as you can probably guess from that title, the bands are what you'd hear on college radio stations and the like. REM, The White Stripes, Green Day, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Feist, Counting Crows and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs have all played during the CMJ Music Marathon. For those of you from Harrisonburg/JMU, you can think of MACRoCK but BIGGER.

One of the perks of it being in lower Manhattan is it's in my neighborhood and everything is pretty much in walking distance from my apartment. NICE. I kicked this year's marathon off with The Spring Standards. I had heard of them before, several times, but never heard THEM. I raced out of school last night (amazingly enough, my last class ended 15 minutes early), practically ran to the subway and took the train downtown to meet my roommate and catch the show at 8:00. Made it with about 7 minutes to spare. Absolutely perfect. And an absolutely perfect kick off show for me!


Goodbye Midnight - The Spring Standards

So many great shows to see and there is no way to catch them all, sigh. There are some I'm really hoping to catch (Boy & Bear, Walk The Moon, Rachel Yamagata, Elle King...) and I'm crossing my fingers to get them all. It's a great week to live in lower Manhattan... but then again, when isn't it?