Discovering the Athens Music Scene

There's this free magazine published weekly here in Athens called Flagpole. It provides a nice calendar of events for the week, including concerts and shows downtown. I've lived in Athens for over a year now and I just recently discovered this magazine and, with it, the awesome music scene in Athens.

I'd heard of the music scene in Athens but I ignored it because, well, I've kind of become somewhat antisocial since moving to Georgia. (Bad. I know. I'm working on it.) Because of my antisocial tendencies, I generally tend to avoid places where there are a lot of people (duh)-- including downtown and various events. But after discovering Flagpole magazine and their website, I realized I'm not allowed to be a hermit anymore because then I'm going to miss all of these awesome concerts. Just recently I missed concerts by Explosions in the Sky and Azure Ray. It kills me to think of the shows I may have missed this past year I've been living huddled up in my house.

Well, on Thursday last week, Brenden and I grabbed lunch at this awesome burger place called Stuffed Burger where they literally stuff your meat patty with food. It sounds a little gross but is actually really delicious. Anyway, at this burger joint, the latest Flagpole magazine was sitting in a stand near the counter. I grabbed it to flip through while we waited for our food. I quickly discovered that there was going to be an Album Leaf and Tycho concert on Saturday night at the Georgia Theatre. I didn't know who Tycho was but I've loved the Album Leaf since high school and I told Brenden right then and there that we were, in fact, going to a concert on Saturday.

And we did.

We sat on bar stools in the balcony to avoid the bulk of the crowd on the main floor which was standing room only. The music was so good. It was loud and I never really thought about listening to the Album Leaf at such a high volume but now that I have, I'm not sure how else to listen to him. Tycho was pretty good too. The crowd seemed to be more familiar with Tycho than Album Leaf, which okay, I'll admit, I'm really behind in discovering new music. New music for me, lately, has been the most recent albums of artists I liked in high school.

I'm sort of on a quest to rediscover things that once made me really happy but I pushed aside for one reason or another. This concert was a stop on that quest.

I determined I still really love live music shows despite the crowds.

Thank you Album Leaf and Tycho for bringing me back.

Here are two Youtube videos of songs from Tycho and The Album Leaf. The first video is Daydream by Tycho, which they performed at the show and the second is Into the Sea by The Album Leaf, which is a track I just really like (for some reason this video's length is seven minutes but the song is only about four and a half minutes long so the rest of the track is silence.) Enjoy!