What makes a great music festival?

Certain key ingredients are needed to create an interesting music festival. It starts with an attractive city. Then, of course, isn’t it all about the performing artists? The music itself. You would want to showcase some of the finest musicians the hosting city has to offer, but at the same time, you’d want to welcome artists from other places in the world. What about the location of the stages and venues? With winter festivals, you’d need to keep it indoors, so no baseball fields and the likes possible. As a festival attendee, it’s nice when you can walk everything on foot and don’t have to rely on pedicabs or taxis or the like.

The New Colossus Festival, at home in New York, seems to be able to offer it all. In the heart of the Lower East Side, the festival welcomes music lovers from all over the globe to see showcasing artists from the US, Canada, and Europe. From March 9 to March 13, more than 130 artists are performing on smaller and bigger stages alike. Thanks to the close proximity of the venues with the Bowery Electric and Heaven Can Wait building the farthest out; it is possible to get a really good taste of the current state of Indie rock (lots of shoegaze!) and pop music. With a badge, the five days event pass, you can float in and out of venues and shows and can catch as many performances and artists as you can.

Now in its fourth year, the New Colossus Festival has seen it all, and we remember each installment fondly, with the 2020 one maybe still the most unforgettable, when we danced on the brink of the outbreak of the pandemic! Were you there? Let us know.

We hope to connect with fans and bands come March 8th and are especially looking forward to the exquisite daytime programming and the daytime shows. With the festival schedule being out, we have our favorites identified and marked our calendars accordingly. Stay tuned when we reveal our favs. See you at the festival!

Song Pick of the Day

Listen/watch all seven songs on YouTube. Follow our daily updated playlists on YouTube and Spotify for the 50 latest Song Picks of the Day.

Piper Durabo aka Maraschino has a song “or the underdogs who’ve given up on finding love.” With Valentine’s Day coming up, the shimmering synth-pop track “Angelface” may be just what you need. The London-based dark pop queen Circe sings about feminine energy in her new song “Undone.” She says: “when a song flips your heart or wrenches your gut, I feel that energy is very present.”

Austrian quintet Crush is working on their new album Past Perfect. Their new single “Where Flower Grow” is an upbeat, jangly indie pop song that comes with a gorgeous video:

Sisters Laura and Kara of Otra listened a lot to Haim and St. Vincent and then took their edgy synth-pop a step further. “E & M” is the closer of their upcoming album, I’m Not that Way, out on May 5. “Mr. Perfect,” the new single by Irish singer, songwriter, and producer ESSIRAY, is not about what you might think. “stop analyzing me, I am single, happy, and I’m free,” she sings and probably enjoys V-Day solo.

Brooklyn singer/songwriter Pearla just has released her lush debut record, Oh Glistening Onion, The Nighttime Is Coming. There is a lot to be discovered on this album, for example, “Unglow The,” a reflection on mortality.

“No matter how badly we want something, it won’t always (or rarely ever) pan out the way we want it to,” says London-based singer/songwriter Liv East about her scorching hot new track “So Badly.” The jazzy vibe comes not just from samples: renowned jazz musicians contributed to the music.

Four albums for your (virtual) turntables

• Andy Shauf - Norm
• Bailey Miller - love is a dying
• Black Belt Eagle Scout - The Land, The Water, The Sky
• Pearla - Oh Glistening Onion, The Nighttime Is Coming

Also, the Grammys happened last week

The Grammys market themselves at the biggest night in music. And that is true if you want to celebrate popularity and commercial success. However, that is not glamglare: we believe that the worth of music cannot be measured with gilded little gramophone sculptures. But that does not mean that musicians that we featured on the blog would not move on to become Grammy-award nominees, for example:

• The first hit of the dance-pop duo Sofi Tukker, “Drinkee” was a Song Pick on November 22, 2015, and we saw them live for the first time a little later. We even ran into them at Rockwood Music Hall the very day their nomination was announced, so we could congratulate them in person.
• Prog rock band Nothing More has three Grammy nominations on their record. While their genre is not what we usually cover on glamglare, their energetic live show is something special, and we have seen them several times live, from a tiny tent at SXSW 2014 to New York’s Irving Plaza.
• We saw Highly Suspect two times at SXSW 2015 on impossibly small stages. And we had “Lydia” on our site a year before they played it at the Grammys in 2016.

Nine Photos from The New Colossus Festival