On Warmer Music's Spring 2014 Mix

via Chicago Colors

By this point in the year, most of my friends are pretty sick of me but this year, I'm starting to fear for my safety. As you might remember, I'm one of the few Chicagoans who is an unapologetic fan of winter. Far from a popular position in an average year, this year it was the kind of thing that had visions of torches and pitchforks dancing in Chiberians frostbitten heads.

But even after a winter as historically bleak as this one I will still defend my love of true winter because it makes the spring all that much sweeter. This morning I smiled because it was raining. Rather than snowing. In late March. Only someone whose dealt with freezer burn on their lungs could find happiness in a drippy, 40 degree day.

Indeed spring in the midwest is a brief and flighty thing that exists for, at most, six non-consecutive weeks between March and early June but it's no less glorious because of it. A long-time spring fever sufferer, I still dream every year of the utterly giddy feeling I got in college when the season's first day over 50 when I could get away with skipping an afternoon class, throwing together a mixtape and go tooling down country roads to find a place to walk amidst woods and birds.

Don't get me wrong, as a whole, spring 'round these parts is perhaps the least satisfying season. But like that girl/boy/other you always had a crush on growing up, the brief moments when the light shines on you are unbelievably heady in a ways a solid. steady relationship/season (OK, this metaphor is getting out of hand) never quite could.

A Musical Salute To Chicago Brewing

Tonight at 5:30 pm I was at Garfield Park Conservatory with a few hundred other committed geeks and aficionados quaffing locally-made beers to mark the kickoff of Chicago Craft Beer Week. It's a glorious, eleven day (that's right, a week can be eleven days when there's beer involved) celebration of Chicago brewers and Chicago bars that celebrate great beer. Not just in the city but throughout the suburbs there will tap takeovers, special brews, beach parties, mini-golf and almost any manner of beer-related merrymaking that you can think of - a hophead's dream come true.


Craft beer was a part of my life for years before I touched the stuff thanks to my father dragging my mother and I to brewpubs across the country throughout my childhood. By the time he left me at college with the instructions "When you drink, drink good beer," I was hooked. It's not coincidental that I was also getting pretty seriously into music around the same time as beer makes music sound better and listening to music is a perfect opportunity to drink great beer. With that in mind, I decided to make a minor contribution to #CCBW with an esoteric musical salute to the brewers that make Chicago such a great beer city.

Covering Our Bases - The Velvet Underground

You shoulda seen 'em then...

Certain bands are so influential that they become touchstones in the history of popular music. There are few better ways of measuring a band's influence than the amount of nods it gets via covers. Since nothing gets On Warmer Music going like a good cover, we'll take some time to look at those bands.


The Velvet Underground are perhaps the classic cult band. Formed by Andy Warhol in 1966 around Lou Reed, they released four classic albums that combined lyrics about deviant sex, hard drug use and arty pretensions with a mixture of vicious noise freakouts and poppy gems. It's been hoarily said that "they didn't sell many albums, but everyone who bought one went on to form a band" but by the last decade they were such a hip influence that Eddie Argos from Art Brut complained that he didn't "want to hear the sound of the Velvet Underground a second time around". That notwithstanding, the Velvets are founding fathers (/mothers) of the very idea of "indie rock" and today we've got some proof.