Archiving live music for rainy days 🎸

From my first concert to my last*, I've loved the experience and art of live music. To date, I've been to 47 shows from Alt-j at the Colorado Red Rocks Ampitheatre to Sidney Gish, a college friend, at a backyard show in Somerville. To keep track of them all, I kept a running list of shows in an iCloud note doc. But in 2019, I decided it was time for an upgrade.

On the heels of a project I had just finished at work, I decided to recycle our tech stack to 1) better organize details about my concerts and 2) to reinforce the technical skills I had gained while they were still fresh. The result: a Jekyll static site built around an Airtable database of concerts detailing headliners, openers, venues and friends I went with (sometimes the best part of a show).

And then a year went by... 😬

Now, with concerts cancelled due to the pandemic, I'm revisiting this project with hopes of finally seeing it through. After all, my goal was for this was to build an interactive scrapbook of sorts — not just a glorified list. So, I'm digging up all my old photos and videos to playback here in one spot. And then maybe, just maybe, I can try to relive a time when PPE, to me, was just a pair of earplugs.

➡️ Check out the project at https://alexanderlim9.github.io/concerts/.

*Arcade Fire, Barclay's Center, August 2014 and Sudan Archives, Great Scott, March 2020 respectively