Steel Wagstaff

There are some colors that just demand to be treated and loved on their own. Musically, blue is one of those colors. We didn’t even touch the blues (future show alert), and even left out Miles Davis, but still strung together a pretty compelling hour of music.

This week’s show featured songs in a generous mood, as their titles came from the GIV segment of the visible spectrum [Green, Indigo, Violet]. We had the same studio problems as the week previous, but here’s a mostly complete Spotify playlist:

How else can you follow three weeks of LGBTQ music than by moving into the rainbow? In preparing for this show, I learned that Harry Chapin was right: There are so many colors in the rainbow.” We took a look at ROY songs, songs whose titles corresponded to the warm end of that spectrum [Red,…

The theme continued one more week (and could have gone on and on). Great music from LGBTQ artists making compelling sounds largely outside of the commercial mainstream. Part 1: Part 2: http://open.spotify.com/user/steelwagstaff/playlist/5zn9fU2NMaFvZhRHpwyGrG

Carrying on from the previous week, I broke the remaining songs into rough chronological periods. Here’s some amazing music made LGBTQ artists from the 1970s through the 1990s.

I started out thinking I’d just do one show on music made by artists who identified in some way as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgedendered, and/or queer. And then I started listening, and listening, and listening, and couldn’t trim the list down to one brief show. So this is the first part in what ended up…

We gave a loving listen to some of the more colorful and under-celebrated figures making sonic stylings in the recent world of music. Part 1: Part 2:

To celebrate the beginning of a new school year and welcome thousands of new Badgers to town, we dropped some knowledge on them. We came at them HARD with Skool Subjectz. Pow. Part 1: Part 2:

It was the end of August and we had much to rejoice about. Including these songs.

Sometimes we are profoundly sad. We can’t always explain it, or point to a proximate cause. And still, there is music.

Remember Contra? Remember hurriedly entering the Konami Code [U, U, D, D, L, R, L, R, B, A, B, A, Select, Start] right before the credit screen loaded to get a whole bunch of extra lives? We do. We musically recreated the Konami Code and it was (unsurprisingly) awesome.

I finished teaching summer school earlier in the day, so we celebrated the end of another semester with this jubilant songs.

We traveled back in time to 1968 to drink in some of the year’s finest sounds.

We took a musical tour of the world’s islands, from the Caribbean to Southeast Asia. It sounded beautiful.

Our second show. Our theme for this week was Betrayal.

This was my first ever show. The theme for the week was Superstition. Enjoy!