Pre-Election Encouragement – November 2, 2016

| Radio

Since the election was all anyone was thinking about anyway, we decided to provide some musical encouragement on Bubble Wrap this week.  But we threw in someunrelated new stuff too, just to keep it interesting.  First off, apologies in advance to purists who think Bruno Mars is too pop for an indie show.  I agree.  […]

Stronger Than Witchcraft – The Bubble Wrap 2016 Hallowe’en Show

| Radio

Doing a Hallowe’en show on the radio is always fun — it brings out your inner ham and suddenly you’re playing sound effects records of haunted mansions and wishing you had Monster Mash on your iPad… This year’s Bubble Wrap Halloween playlist consisted of two types of Halloween song. There are the songs that are […]

All Over Town: October 19, 2016

| Radio

There are weeks when we’re less inspired by the Bubble Wrap playlist options than others, but we always try to put together a good mix of old and new, warped and accessible, or at least entertaining… This week, we dug back in the archives for forgotten gems like “Man in the House” by Greenskeeper and […]

Moonlight People: Playlist for October 12, 2016

| Radio

It’s hard to do a radio show in a vacuum, which is why this autumn’s media mayhem is great for sparking interesting musical choices.  The interesting new artist of this week’s Bubble Wrap show was Chicago Farmer, aka Cody Dickoff (pronounced Dee-cough! — you can see why he calls himself Chicago Farmer.)  The record, Midwest […]

Wild Nothings: Playlist for October 5, 2016

| Radio

This week on Bubble Wrap we focused on new music again with no particular theme in mind.  There were a few chestnuts in there — accordion virtuoso Brent Buswell’s Pennsylvania Polka provided a rousing opening.  In honor of hurricane Matthew, we tossed in Hurricane by Crooked Fingers, a perennial favorite of mine.  We enjoyed a […]

The Way We Play – September 28, 2016

| Radio

No theme, no thought, just raw, unravelled rock and pop, also hip hop, spoken word, and a show tune, Bubble Wrap is past redemption, and we don’t care! Playlist below. September 28, 2016 The Way We Play Grandmaster Flash – The Adventures of GMF on the Wheels of Steel * Dirty Projectors with Bjork – […]

Summer of Black Lives Ending – September 21, 2016

| Radio, Songs

There were more police killings of black men this week, including Keith Scott and Terence Crutcher, bringing a sense of frustration and grief that can’t go away because they don’t stop happening…  This week’s Bubble Wrap show featured lots of funk, r&b, hip hop, and even some disco (imagine that), mostly addressing the black experience, […]

Adventures in Radio – September 14, 2016

| Radio

Our discovery this week was The 1975.  We’re sorry we didn’t bother to listen to them sooner.  Despite occasionally sounding like a boy band, there’s an undercurrent of coolness to their ultra-pop.  “Love Me,” the track we played, is killer dance pop.  Hard not to like. Ditto for Angel Olsen whose My Woman album seems […]

The Pitfalls of an Unintegrated Set List – September 7, 2016

| Radio

On Bubble Wrap this week, we realized once again why sets of one person’s musical selections alternating with another person’s selections leads to chaos, both aurally and emotionally.  Just when you’re ready to get out the bourbon, a comedy number comes on.  Next we’re making you get your dancing shoes on, then we’re telling you […]

Twentieth Century Sound Survey – with Guest Host Bill LePage

| Radio

Composer, musician, and brother Bill LePage joined us on June 22 for a different sort of Bubble Wrap show, taking the concept of independent music far from the bounds to which the term is usually applied. Playing everything from Pogo to Ravel, Bill approached the sounds of the 20th century in a genre-agnostic way, mixing […]

Signature Sounds Showcase: Winterpills, And The Kids, The Suitcase Junket

| Radio

Considering that we practically live in their backyard, it’s surprising that we never noticed Signature Sounds Recordings until now. Signature Sounds is a label out of Northampton, Massachusetts, originally focused on folk, Americana, and singer-songwriter music, and more recently branching out into rock and indie.  Folk is not usually my thing but recently I discovered […]

If I were from the Big Town, I would be calm and debonair: Summer Sounds

| Radio, Songs

It’s August here in the small Vermont town where I live, and even here, in the so-called north country, we’re experiencing a bona fide heat wave.  To celebrate, we watched Seven Year Itch while eating take-out sushi and drinking basil vodka.  Yeah, it’s that kind of summer night.  This week’s Bubble Wrap show was not […]

Old, New, Borrowed and Blue Songs

| Radio

With a wedding in our recent history, we went with a tried and winning formula for our August 3, 2016 show: old, new, borrowed, and blue.  We pulled together tracks by Galaxie 500 and the Go Betweens (old), a pretty cover from Winterpills (borrowed), a bunch of stuff from 2013 through this year (new), and […]