Black is the New AP Style

Photo courtesy of Kyle Dunleavy/Ravinia Festival

For the last two years, Kesha has used the word “rainbow” to describe everything that she is. It’s the name of her album; the thing that brought her out of the darkness, through the unspeakably hard times and into the person that she is today. It represents her personality, her outlook on life and her willingness to share her story. She’s spread her message through the Rainbow Tour, which made its last stop at Ravinia Festival on September 8, 2019.

With her message comes the same upbeat energy and glitter-infused wardrobe changes that Kesha is known for. A silver spaceship, similar to the one on her album cover, sits atop the stage and is the focal point of her entrances and exits.

Her wardrobe is nothing short of eccentric, from a black one-piece with bottoms that turn into a cape to multi-colored tinsel cardigans and fringed jumpsuits. She even encourages the audience to contribute their wardrobes to the stage during “Take It Off” which brings forth numerous bras, pairs of underwear and even a pair of tie dye shorts – the latter of which she gives back after the song. She tells the audience she’s been collecting bras from every night of the tour and has been stringing them together. It has to be over five miles long, she says.

She plays guitar for songs such as “Timber” and “Bastards” and has choreographed dances moves for “Woman” and “Tik Tok”. She dedicates “We R Who We R” to the LGBTQ+ community and uses time in between songs to talk about her stance on basic human rights. She forgets the first verse to “Your Love is My Drug” but it’s no matter, the crowd has her covered until she figures it out. She can never remember that verse, she says.

She brings the audience to tears during “Praying”, which is no small feat. This audience ranges from families picnicking on the lawn to preteen girls spread throughout the seats to drag queens gracing the front row. The show is over in just over an hour, and while there was no confetti or streamers littering the ground, there was still that sense of admiration amongst the concertgoers. They had just witnessed an actual phoenix that rose from the ashes, and they might never see something like that again.

Rainbow is an era of Kesha’s career that speaks to everyone and resonates in a way that she’s never experienced before. The live shows around that album have brought together groups of people that all have the same beliefs and dreams, and the last live show was no different.

Photo courtesy of Mark DiLillo

A little bit of background: I hadn’t been into Tennis for a very long time. It was their most recent album at the time, Yours Conditionally, that I had gotten into. I listened to their older records too and discovered my favorite tracks of theirs. Tennis became everything I was looking for in a band in a very short time. Needless to say, when I heard they were coming to Austin to promote said album, I knew it was a show I had to attend.

I went with two of my best friends, Dan and Ashley. Dan and I lived together for three years in college, two of those years in the same room. He and I have similar taste in music and humor, and had genuine camaraderie. We both happened to move to the Austin area after college. It wasn’t long before he met Ashley and sometime later they got married and she became one of my best friends as well. They are the main cats I hang out with when I get some free time to peruse the town.

Onto the show. We entered the building on the brisk February evening during their first song, “My Emotions are Blinding”, which I bring up because of the title of this piece. Not a coincidence. I don’t believe in them; you’ll see why by the end.

It was already a dance party when we joined the crowd. They were nailing every song, we were singing along, and the house mix was astounding. It wasn’t the performance itself that put me into an emotional whirlpool, but the story the singer told before the last song. Tennis is made up of husband/wife duo Alaina and Patrick. Patrick was playing a guitar passed down by his late father, a person they were both close to. He had passed recently and Alaina was telling the crowd about how the death affected them during their musical journey and life in general. The words were spoken through a microphone but they felt as intimate as a campfire story. I felt the chills throughout my whole body.

Suddenly I flashed back to high school. One of my best friends then was named Matthew. He and I got to know each other well in middle school during classes and - wouldn’t you know it - the game of tennis. It was the summer after our sophomore year of high school; we hadn’t played in awhile, and I kept meaning to reach out to him to meet up at the courts. And then I kept pushing it off. Then one day I got a phone call that he had done himself in. Just strangled himself next to a note. Nobody saw it coming; he was as happy-go-lucky as can be. I learned a very crucial lesson that summer as a teenager.

Noncoincidentally I was reminded of that lesson there in that huge Austin venue. Standing in admiration of these musical luminaries, next to my best friends. During a plateaued season of life, when I myself was trying to claw my way up the foothills of the musical industry mountain.

All three of us stood there welling up as Alaina spoke about the importance of the relationship of her father-in-law to them and their music. Faces of people that were important to me flashed into my head as they finished their set, and I’m guessing that happened to a lot of people. The lesson of cherishing those relationships while you still can hit me as hard as the music did that night. And I couldn't have been there with better friends to remind me.

- Mark DiLillo, Welsh Avenue

Almost a year after the release of her Tinted Glasses EP, Maggie Schneider found herself back in the studio. She had her friends alongside her at Home Grown Studios in Atlanta, and knew that this time around she was ready to create a full-length album.

The song that started it all, “Don’t Tell Me”, materialized from a night spent tossing and turning, thinking about a slew of recent negative comments. They commented on her looks, her music, her artistry; she finally got fed up. She pulled up the notes app on her iPhone and without overthinking, words just came pouring out.

“It just came out without structure; a freeform organic poem basically,” she said. “I was pissed off and it was cathartic to put all of that out there.”

The next day the line “don’t tell me who to be” came into her head and within two hours she had written the entire song. It has since become the song she’s most proud of writing, and the stepping off point for creating her next album.

Shockingly, “Don’t Tell Me” is one of the very few songs that she wrote all of the music and lyrics to. Her co-collaborators, Nick Pena and Alex Crain, worked on a lot of Tinted Glasses with Schneider and spent months with her on this current project.

“It was a long process but it was so rewarding because we made sure that my vision came to life,” she said.

Schneider calls herself a perfectionist and finds it easier to create a melody than lyrics. Being able to collaborate gives her the confidence to write music, which ultimately gave her that final push to create an LP instead of an EP this time around.

“I'm a big believer of go big or go home,”she said. “Making a full-length record has always been a dream of mine and something I've always wanted to do, so I thought this [was] the perfect opportunity to record a bunch of songs that I've been holding onto for months and finally create a cohesive collection of songs.”

Behind all the new music is a message; a message that comes through not just in “Don’t Tell Me” but in everything she puts out and at every live show - “never let anyone tell you what to do or who to be.” She’s stuck by this message and personally connected with it in so many ways, so it’s fitting that she continues to spread the word.

Maggie Schneider is gearing up to release her biggest body of work to date, and is celebrating with the release of the music video for “Don’t Tell Me” which just premiered on Substream. Check it out!

A significant memory that stands out for Dan McKay is riding his bike to a family member’s house to rip a vinyl record onto a cassette tape. That’s where he got his first taste of The Doors, Duran Duran, The Rolling Stones and so much more. From there, he progressed to playing guitar, joining a band, becoming a sound engineer and ultimately working as a tour manager.

He got his first taste as a sound engineer recording demos with his band as a teenager. In an interview with Digital Tour Bus, he said that brought him to working at a venue that operated in the back of a record store/skate shop combo. From there he was able to get his first head audio gig and ultimately his first tour as a Front of House (FOH) Engineer. Three months into the FOH gig, the tour’s manager quit. It was the perfect opportunity to prove that he was the right choice to replace them.

“There was no other path really,” McKay said. “That’s what it was going to be; bands, to sound engineer to tour manager.”

McKay is currently touring with the likes of Cypress Hill, AWOLNATION, Eagles of Death Metal and The Distillers. If anyone had told 11-year old Dan McKay, the kid with the paper route that spent every morning prepping his papers and riding his bike through town while listening to the first Cypress Hill record on his giant yellow Walkman, that he would be on tour with them one day… “no way.”

“Sometimes I need to stop myself and go, ‘this is what I do….weird.’ Not a lot of people get to do this, and even less people can do this,” he said.

Since trying tour managing at the age of 24, McKay has held on to that passion and cites that and staying focused as two pieces of advice he still sticks to. As a kid, his life revolved around music and once he started working as a sound engineer, that passion really hit him hard. He really can’t see himself being anywhere else.

“I think I’ll be here for a while,” he said.

He’s gone from the kid who dreamed of seeing the world, to travelling with music’s greatest performers, and now gets to travel the world with his kids – many once-of-a-lifetime opportunities that he still can’t totally believe keep happening to him.

“I feel privileged to work with people with so much talent; legends.”

Cassidy Margolis has always found herself in lucky situations involving playing in bands. They’ve always been supportive, collaborative efforts that have taught her sides of the music industry that she wouldn’t have otherwise learned. Being in a band, however, doesn’t always give everyone the chance to produce the exact content that they want.

It’s difficult to articulate a love and appreciation for playing in bands while talking about branching out into solo projects, but Margolis can’t stress enough how her time playing in bands was life changing. Her latest project, Margø, incorporates much of what she created in previous endeavors but gives her the opportunity to make it 100% her.

“I really love writing my own music and being able to express myself,” she said. “I've always had a vision for what style of music I wanted to pursue and I found doing that alone I was able to express that more easily… This was my effort to be able to say my piece and write from my heart and make music the way I wanted it.”

The moniker she goes by for this project stems both from a love of her family and the endless possibilities her music will bring. Margø comes from her last name, Margolis, and the ø is meant to represent a zero. In numerology, the zero stands for encompassing all possibilities and all paths which is something that she really resonated with. Anything is possible, really.

This project has come along much quicker than expected, but she wouldn’t change a moment of it. She released her first single, “In Between”, and was met with almost immediate traction after being picked up by popular YouTube channel CloudKid. Her second single, “Game Over”, was featured in a Fresh Finds playlist by Spotify and her latest single, “LOVELOST”, was just released.

For Margolis, creating the music is only half the fun, however. She plans on releasing more music the rest of the year and eventually turning those singles into an EP, but she absolutely loves performing them live.

“My favorite part has always been being able to stand up on a stage and share music with a room full of people,”she said. “There's nothing better in the entire world than having a group of people in the same room all singing along, all sharing the same experiences and being brought together by music.”

This new project is truly the heart and soul of Cassidy Margolis, as it comes from her very core; her experiences, her feelings and her heart. Margø is clearly a passion project that gives her the chance to fully express herself, and if her first three singles are any indication of what’s to come, then the world is in for a treat.

In the fictional, suburban town of Stoneybrook, Connecticut, four girls started a club to provide their babysitting services. What was originally planned as a four-book series quickly turned into over 200 novels that broke off into side stories, spin-offs, graphic novels, a television series and film. The Baby-Sitters Club inspired a generation of book lovers in the late 1980s to 2000 and still resonates with them today.

This week, the world’s largest producer and provider of downloadable audiobooks and other spoken-word entertainment, Audible, released all 131 of Ann M. Martin’s titles to their collection.

“I’m thrilled to see that the readership for The Baby-Sitters Club continues to grow after all these years,” Martin said in a press release. “And I’m grateful and honored to hear from fans – young and old – who have supported the series with such affection, love and nostalgia for all things BSC. I’m excited that Audible will bring the books to life in a new format for the next generation.”

In honor of their release on Audible, here are memories from those that grew up alongside the novels:

“I started reading them pretty young and kept reading them after I had moved on to older books. I'd go back to them when I couldn't decide what to read or when I had a book hangover. The mysteries were my favorite. I was 100% a Kristy, minus the divorced parents, but I desperately wanted to be Claudia or Stacy.” – Anne, Illinois

“My third grade teacher introduced me to the series and I absolutely loved them!” – Angela, Arizona

“By the time I was in third grade, there were ninety-nine books in the series. Since I hadn’t seen a one-hundredth book in stores yet, I decided to create my own called Baby-Sitters Little Sister #100: The Three Musketeers. The title of the book was inspired by my two close friends at the time: Michelle and Amanda.” – Britni, Iowa

“I still remember taking Babysitters on Board (the Super Special) with me on my family trip to Disney. I lived for the Super Specials.” – Brittany, New York

“Our Scholastic book fair had a way to subscribe to the BSC so I got a book in the mail periodically until I had 1-90 and 5-6 super specials! I remember reading them in the bathtub and at the dinner table and everywhere in between. I [truly] loved the books and am so glad my mom saved them so I can show them to my daughter!” Jessica, Oklahoma

“I read all the little sister ones my library had in a summer! But I never read the “big sister” ones [because] I thought that was disloyal.” – Ellie, Michigan

“I almost tore the book in half from excitement when I learned Claudia was Asian. I never read a book where a teenage character was Asian American, let alone one that was an artist too! I’m tearing up just thinking about it. For me, I was a little bit of an outcast growing up and to see Claudia accepted by her peers and doing typical American teenager activities brought me so much joy. Even though she was Japanese and I’m Chinese, it still made me so happy to see the representation.” – Sun, Washington

“I think I had at least 50 of the BSC books and another 25 of the little sister series. The idea of them all gathering in Kristy's room with her private phone line was amazing to me. So grown up! Plus, I heavily identified with Mallory, for obvious reasons. I also loved that you didn't necessarily have to read the books in order which was very important back in the mid-90s when the library didn't have all the books in the series and interlibrary loans were harder to do.” – Mallory, Virginia

“Claudia was my first inspiration to care about fashion, and she seemed super-cool and I wanted to be her friend, and I didn’t really like anybody else’s character all that much but just kept reading because of her. And I also stole the “kid kit” idea when I started babysitting.” – Kat, Maryland

Life on the road always starts out in a less-than-ideal environment for bands new to the touring scene. Indie alt-pop band Royal Teeth was no exception, with six members and typically one shared hotel room. They’ve since dropped down to four members and have spent the last few years constantly touring, getting the opportunity to become comfortable around each other.

“It’s a lot easier and calmer than it used to be,” vocalist Gary Larsen said. “It’s a very chill environment.”

Their chill environment is seen from their long drives listening to podcasts, to a relatively calm green room right before a show.
“We like to give each other space,” Larsen said. “We don’t really create loud party environments that others can’t escape.”

They aren’t incredibly picky when they describe their ideal tour. They’ve never travelled in a tour bus, but wouldn’t mind giving that a shot sometime. They usually have a rider comprised of three things: water, vegetables and whiskey. They have a love for theaters and still have an intimate vibe at all their shows.

They are no stranger to festivals, however. From their hometown festival of Jazzfest in New Orleans to Festival International in Lafayette, playing them has been nothing short of beautiful memories.

“I also remember our first time playing Firefly thinking no one was going to watch us [because] there was maybe 5-10 people in the field waiting while we were soundchecking,” Larsen said. “As soon as the band across the field finished, everyone ran over to our stage right as we were starting the first song and it felt pretty surreal.”

For Larsen, he constantly tries to remain in the moment and reminds himself to enjoy the experience as much as possible. There was a point where he was taking his position for granted and didn’t get to enjoy the places the band was travelling to. Now, he makes sure to see a little bit of every city he’s in. The biggest piece of advice that has really stuck with him?

“Just to be kind to everyone. It’s a small world and a little kindness goes a long way. It still amazes me how much kindness we’ve received from people while touring so we want to make sure we give that back as much as possible.”

Listen to Royal Teeth's latest LP, HARD LUCK

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