"All your indie faves are jam bands now"
It’s no secret that indie bands have been embracing jam bands more than ever lately (and vice versa), and the indie/jam crossover has gotten so big that even The Washington Post caught on and just ran a new article titled “After a long, strange trip … all your indie faves are jam bands now.” Chris Richards writes:
Twenty years ago, this would have been unthinkable. Indie rock (let’s say: everything that descends from the Velvet Underground) and jam band music (let’s say: everything that descends from the Grateful Dead) have traditionally felt incompatible, if not adversarial. Indie people are skeptical and fickle. Jam band people are undiscriminating and loyal. Indie is principled. Jam is chill. Indie scorns. Jam accepts. Yes, plenty of indie guitar heroes spent their respective ’90s stretching grooves out toward enlightenment — Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr., Yo La Tengo, Fugazi — but the difference between an indie band and a jam band still used to feel like night and day, oil and water, Lollapalooza and H.O.R.D.E.
The WaPo piece breaks the indie/jam crossover down into a timeline of key events, from Bonnaroo booking My Morning Jacket back in ’03 up through the new Vampire Weekend album, and it looks like this:
* 2003: My Morning Jacket plays its first Bonnaroo
* 2007: Wilco lands on the cover of Relix
* 2009: Animal Collective samples the Grateful Dead
* 2010: Woods’s ‘At Echo Lake’
* 2011: Real Estate’s ‘Days’
* 2013: Kurt Vile’s ‘Wakin on a Pretty Daze’
* 2016: The National curates the tribute album ‘Day of the Dead’
* 2018: Ryley Walker covers the Dave Matthews Band
* 2019: Vampire Weekend’s ‘Father of the Bride’
—
You can read the full article here and listen to members of Grizzly Bear and The National cover The Grateful Dead’s “Terrapin Station” suite below.
