I love the lineup for this year — Mutemath, Lucero, and Brett Dennen — but I’m always cautious and worried about our poorly designed “bandshell” in Forsyth, which is at least three feet too low and surrounded by the virtual moat of a little-used fountain. It’s a terrible design.

The reason I didn’t write about the lineup announcement here before now: since last fall, I’ve been editing the music blog hissing lawns, where Anna Chandler promptly put up an excellent post about the May 30th show: Mutemath, Lucero, Brett Dennen to play SCAD New Alumni Concert

I also put a link to that post on the Savannah Unplugged Facebook page.

So go check out Anna’s coverage if you want more info on the bands.

Here’s a shot I took of Lucero from their gig earlier this year at The Jinx:

I started the blog with a handful of other live music enthusiasts back in September, and we’re thrilled by how successful so far. I’m especially proud of the quality of hissing lawns’ photo galleries, featuring work by Tom Cartmel, Petee Worrell, Jon Waits, and me.

But we’d like to see the blog continue to grow. So if you’re interested in the Savannah music scene please check out the blog and take a second to follow on Twitter and/or on Facebook. Savannah is a pretty small media market, which makes driving traffic to a specialty blog pretty difficult. So sharing content would be much appreciated too. We’re also on the lookout for additional contributors.

Thanks,
Bill

Every music lover had a unique experience in March, but just consider a few of the shows, performers, and events.

March started with Band of Horses’ acoustic performance at Trustees Theater — amazing. Click here for a short review and some photos. That link will take you, by the way, to the music blog hissing lawns, where I and some other contributors are routinely posting music news and photo galleries.

We also have a pretty active Facebook page for hissing lawns. Please go give it a like if you want regular updates about the local and regional music scene. Facebook continues to be a critical driver of traffic for small blogs like hissing lawns and Savannah Unplugged. (You can like Savannah Unplugged on Facebook by clicking on the box at the top of the sidebar on the right.)

After BOH’s great show, we went right into Savannah Stopover. We have tons of posts and galleries at hissing lawns about Stopover, but readers of this blog might especially be interested in some of the reviews from out-of-town critics, a few of which I excerpted in one post. Among the highlights of the festival: St. Paul and The Broken Bones, Those Darlins, The Weeks, Future Islands, Big Ups, Oberhofer, Small Black, and on and on.

The outdoor music planned for St. Patrick’s Day was significantly compromised by the weather and the timing of a Monday parade, but I have been generally critical of the whole notion that we need to charge downtown visitors for wristbands so that we can fund lots of stages. Still, there was certainly some good music to be found over that long weekend.

Anyway, moving on: the Savannah Music Festival — now in its 25th year (about half of those years as Savannah Onstage) — is having another stellar year.

I’ve seen five shows — all sellouts:

• The Avett Brothers
• Asif Ali Khan
• Punch Brothers
• Jason Isbell
• Preservation Hall Jazz Band

By the way, I bought two tickets each to Punch Brothers and the Avetts, and I use a press pass to get into some of the general admission shows.

All 5 of those shows were tremendous productions, although I don’t know if I’ll go see The Avett Brothers again unless they get some more great music out there. As I noted in my Unplugged column in Do a couple of days ago, I think the band’s best work is now a few years old. And now that they’re headed deep into their 30s, the Avetts won’t be able to rely quite as much on that young, sexy vibe that helped them get where they are.

Punch Brothers, on the other hand . . . it’s too bad in a way that the five members all seem to have other projects being juggled simultaneously. One wonders just how good they’d be if they devoted their full attention to such a rich project. Led by Chris Thile — who on stage has sort of a seductive slitheriness that seems like a combination of Jude Law and Frank Gorshin’s The Riddler — the band wowed the audience at Trustees last Saturday night from start to finish.

I wrote a short review of Jason Isbell’s show for hissing lawns, and I have a bit more to say about the wonderful, vibrant performance by Asif Ali Khan and his ensemble in my City Talk column tomorrow (Sunday).

And note that both Do and Connect are providing extensive and excellent SMF coverage on pretty much a daily basis.

So tonight I have tickets to Taj Mahal. A legend. John Simon is opening, in what promises to be an interesting and idiosyncratic walk through pop history.

And tomorrow I have tickets for an afternoon show with Bela Fleck and Abigail Washburn. Yes.

Taj Mahal is sold out, as are the two shows today by Kristina Train and Pokey LaFarge that I plugged on hissing lawns, and Fleck/Washburn is close to sold out, but it can’t hurt to check the Savannah Box Office website or just show up at the venues.

So, anyway, what more could one want from a month of music in a city the size of Savannah? There have been some great club dates too — both by touring acts and by musicians based here.

I always half-heartedly tried to cultivate other contributors to this blog that you’re reading now, but no connections have ever taken hold.

But, from its very inception, hissing lawns has required and attracted other voices.

So, if you’re interested in reading a lot more about the Savannah scene in 2013, check out hissing lawns’ year-end posts by Petee Worrell, Anna Chandler, Kayne Lanahan of MusicFile Productions, Tom Cartmel, and Larry Jack, who saw 626 performances venues in 2013. I also made a year-end post.

Murder By Death at The Jinx’s 10th anniversary in October 2013

I’ve been swamped with things to do at Armstrong — that’s a key reason I’ve been relatively quiet here.

And I’m also working in some fashion almost daily on developing the Savannah-based music blog hissing lawns, the name of which is obviously inspired by one of Joni Mitchell’s great albums.

So far, a total of six of us have contributed to the blog in its first 3+ weeks. Among other things, Larry Jack Sammons is doing weekly updates of his pretty incredibly music calendar, Kayne Lanahan of Savannah Stopover and Revival Fest profiled the international up-and-comer Woodkid, and I have posted photos of from the Savannah Jazz Festival and from a few other recent shows, including Saturday’s great gig at The Jinx featuring Little Tybee, Paleface, and Triathalon.

I hope to add some other contributors and beef up other areas of the content in the coming weeks.

The blog is definitely finding an audience that I don’t typically reach. It looks like about 40 percent of hissing lawns’ readers aren’t even among my 3,000+ friends on Facebook (ridiculous, huh?).

So if you frequently stop here to catch up on music offerings around town, it looks like a lot of that content — including my photos — will be migrating over to hissing lawns, which also has a Facebook page and a Twitter.

Traffic on hissing lawns in the first three weeks has been all over the place — from a low of 31 page views on a day that no new posts were made to a high of 195 (we actually might pass that today). Those are pretty modest numbers, but I’m sure other Savannah bloggers know how hard it is to generate traffic in niches in a relatively small city like ours.

So that’s what’s going on. Thanks to all the readers who have supported and continue to support this blog.

Cheers, Bill

1. My Unplugged column in Thursday’s Do gives a bit of a review and recap of the spectacular event.
2. I’ve made several posts of photos to hissing lawns, the music blog that I got off the ground less than two weeks ago.

hissing lawns (named in honor of Joni Mitchell, which was obvious to some of you) already has four regular contributors, with several more on the way. Right now, you can read posts about two weekend shows that I didn’t even know about until the last couple of days. Tomorrow we’ll be posting something about a Friday show that we just found out about this week too.

And that in a nutshell is why the Savannah music scene needs a blog like hissing lawns. The local newspapers are generally working a week or more ahead on their music coverage, but many venues and performers don’t get the word out about upcoming gigs until literally a few days ahead of time. And sometimes we as music fans don’t even want to read an article about a band — we just want a couple of clips of video or audio. Blogs are good for short bursts of information that don’t necessarily warrant more in-depth coverage.

I don’t know quite what this means for the music coverage that I used to put here on Savannah Unplugged. I’m sure I’ll continue to cover some music news here, like the Savannah Music Festival, but the reality is that many of my posts here about little-known bands or with photos of big (at least to me) shows got relatively little traffic. We’ll see.

In other news, I’ve been sending out occasional Savannah Unplugged newsletters via MailChimp with links to the most recent posts plus some additional commentary. I will not be sending these more than once a week. Your email is visible to me but I will never use it for another purpose. These newsletters are pretty easy to do and a couple of good friends have expressed appreciation for them, so I’ll keep at it for the time being. You can sign up using the form embedded in the right sidebar >>>>>>>

Cheers, Bill

Every one of those people seems to agree with me that we need not just one but probably several good music blogs that follow various aspects of the local and regional scene.

But none of those people have ever followed through.

So I’ve decided to forge ahead with some other contributors on a new music blog: hissing lawns.

The title alludes to Joni Mitchell’s classic album and song The Hissing of Summer Lawns. I have also created a Facebook page for hissing lawns.

Most of the posts will be of direct relevance to Savannah, but not all will. Many will be very short and be visible in their entirety on the home page. There will be lots of embedded media. I used the layout of Brooklyn Vegan as a starting point — that’s a design that should be mobile-friendly.

I know that some people have called Savannah Unplugged a music blog, but it’s not really that at all.

Pretty much daily, I see some music news that strikes me as worthy of publishing somewhere, but it’s often too specialized or too late or too offbeat to warrant a separate post on this site or a whole column in the Savannah Morning News.

And, while I don’t know the exact ages of all visitors to Savannah Unplugged, I do have some pretty good demographic data for the 1500+ people who like Savannah Unplugged’s Facebook page. People 24 and under make up 47.2 percent of all Facebook users (wow), but only 9.1 percent of those who “like” Savannah Unplugged are 24 and under (double wow).

So Savannah Unplugged a) is generally not reaching the young people who are key supporters of a local music scene and b) doesn’t provide a great platform for the music news that potential readers likely desire.

For example, consider the following things that have crossed my desk in recent days that are clearly worth passing along: Black Tusk going on a European tour, Little Tybee booking a Savannah gig, the indie label Furious Hooves putting out its first ever compilation for Cassette Store Day, etc., etc. If I did separate posts about all those things here, they’d simply overwhelm the rest of the content.

So I’m rounding up contributors to hissing lawns and hoping a number of them come through.

There are several newsy posts already up, with lots more content and a few other features on the way in the coming weeks.

I’ll still be posting some about music here, of course, as warranted. Some of you like news about festivals, like to see photo galleries, etc.