Notes from the Underground Music Scene

Just the other day, I was scrolling through social media, and I saw someone from South Bend complaining about how there's no good music here.

Record scratch noise.

My eyes jerked away from my phone and looked around me—I was sitting in a bar where a local show was about to happen. This was two days after an open mic night featuring several incredible performers, which I hosted at a local venue where I've seen several of the best performances of my life.

At the end of this month, I'm playing in two different local music festivals—Rebel Art Fest and Riverlights Music Festival. One of my bands didn't even make it into Riverlights because there were too many applicants—and I'm friends with around half of the selection committee.

On top of that, there's the sheer volume of local shows. It would be an easy task to go to a show every single night. In fact, some nights the bigger challenge would be choosing which one to go to.

The naysayers might look down their nose and say that just because there's lots of local music doesn't mean that there's much talent to go around. After all, it doesn't take much to start a band and book a show.

And that's a fair argument to make: quantity doesn't mean quality.

But in the last few years, I have been absolutely astonished by the talent I've seen cropping up around South Bend. I'll play a show with someone I've never met, or I'll hear a demo from some friends starting a new band, and I'll be completely blown away. Even the friends I've known for years seem to be on a hot streak, getting better and better each time I see them.

At the end of the day, I think the dismissal of local music is a byproduct our obsession with instant gratification.

We like our music neatly packaged and free of defect. We've grown accustomed to having our music autotuned and edited and processed so that it has none of the roughness that might occur during a live show. There are no second takes live, and most bands (and venues) are playing through equipment that's a little less than state-of-the-art. And when a local band does record an album, they don't have the millions of dollars it costs to hire the best producers and engineers in the business. In fact, some local bands might have to take out an online loan just to cover the cost of studio time.

Not only that, but investing in the local music community takes energy.

It takes an effort on your part to find out what bands are playing shows, what venues are hosting them, and how you can find them. It takes effort to actually build relationships with the artists on stage, the promoters putting on the show, and the venues hosting them. Sometimes, these relationships get awkward.

As somebody who hosts house shows on the regular, I know how uncomfortable it can be to walk into the home of someone you don't know to watch someone sing songs at you. Especially if only a handful of people show up.

It's easier to just head over to Spotify and shuffle the most played artists of the week. But if something has a low cost, it has a low reward.

And as far as I'm concerned, local music is still the most rewarding thing there is. And South Bend's scene is thriving because of it.