I’m not trying to brag, but I had a pretty crazy weekend of shows. I have been fortunate enough, and was lucky enough, to get tickets to see both Phoebe Bridgers at the Anthem after two years of delays and reschedules, and Paul McCartney in only his second career performance in Baltimore (the last one was with a band he played in before his solo career took off).

But Monday morning, as I was coffee’ing away the hangover and wondering whether that was the last time I’d get to see McCartney live, a question kept coming up: What year is this?

It’s not exactly a secret that for the past two-ish years, music has been… what’s the term… kinda fucking weird? Albums that were in the works kept coming out, musicians kept making music to feed the content machine, but of course as we remember, touring came to almost a complete halt for pretty much everybody who wasn’t a Foo Fighter*. So all of this new music had a disembodied quality, like a side project by a well-known artist that will only exist for that one week they spent in the studio.

Like Bachelor, who’s song “Stay in the Car” was all over local college radio and my recommended Spotify playlists about a year ago. The record sounded great. They canceled their debut tour as COVID cases skyrocketed in the fall of 2021, and ended up having their “live” debut via a virtual festival on YouTube. It’s remained unclear since whether the band will tour or release new material. 

Or Wet Leg, whose post-punk-revival-revival-meets-riot-grrrl “Chaise Longue” was a song-of-the-summer smash by normal measures, but whose album was released almost a year later (due in part to COVID-related production delays), after the completion of their debut US tour. A tour which didn’t anticipate the song’s success and included shows at a whole bunch of hilariously small venues (I can only imagine what DC9 was like that night). They’ll be touring again this fall, ostensibly to support the album that was released this spring, which includes the single that was a big hit last summer. This time, they’re playing a few blocks over at 9:30 Club. 

But Paul McCartney… that one stood out, but not for the obvious reasons. Beyond the scale and spectacle of the McCartney live show, the hour-plus waits at the merch table, and the type of crowds you deal with when tickets range from “pretty expensive!” to “big down payment on a new car,” the expectations of the performer are different. Paul McCartney, like most of the record industry itself, is almost entirely drawing from his back catalog: aside from a handful of “new” songs from the past 20 years, he’s playing the hits of yesterday. People are there for “Let it Be” and “Live and Let Die,” not whatever his latest single is called. He could make up a song on the spot and the audience would probably say, “Guess that’s on the new album?” and immediately forget once he starts telling a story about John Lennon.

That is to say, as much work obviously goes into marketing a tour of that size, Paul McCartney’s reputation precedes him. He’s been playing pretty much exclusively to sold-out stadiums since his old band helped establish the concept of a stadium-sized rock’n’roll show. His tours have been existing outside of time, often only tied to an album release as a matter of formality (or a need to move some more copies of the new stuff), for decades.

For everybody else – even for an established, playing-the-hits level band with decades of material – the timing of the album release, marketing material, promotional events, TV/media placement, and tour schedule is a complex, delicate science.    

For a band or label who had a record slated for release in spring or summer 2020, that could mean at minimum tens of thousands of dollars and years of work lost, reduced to the level of a small-tier musician posting on Bandcamp hoping to recoup on record pre-sales, streaming (ha!) or Patreon.

And while a temporary delay can be spun into anticipation, cancellation can be a death knell. Bachelor’s canceled tour may have canceled plans for a follow-up album. Countless up-and-comers have had to improvise, swapping DIY tours of small venues for livestreamed living room shows. Even for bands who aren’t relying on t-shirt sales to fill up the gas tank between gigs, the rhythm of touring feels off the beat.

At the D.C. date for Bright Eyes’ most recent tour (April 9, 2022), Conor Oberst lamented the strangeness of touring to support an album from 2020, saying something to the effect of, “This was going to be our new song, but now it’s an old one,” before playing the two-year-old single, “Mariana Trench.”  

Frequent Oberst collaborator and Dead Oceans labelmate Phoebe Bridgers made similar remarks at her “Reunion Tour” show, which took place nearly two years to the day after the release of her album “Punisher,” a year and a half after her breakout SNL performance, and a year after the show was originally scheduled.

She also had the unusual instance of playing back-to-back shows not as a planned event, but because in the time it took to reschedule her postponed date, they added new dates, essentially adding a smaller second tour between rescheduled shows. “Some of you bought tickets a long time ago […] Thanks for waiting so long,” she said.

It’s strange enough as a musician to say, “Here’s our new song,” before you play a song you’ve played hundreds of times, that was written and recorded a year ago but only released recently. Having to introduce a song that’s come and gone as “the new one” has to be… kinda fucking weird! 

And as an audience member, it can be disorienting and confusing to reconcile as well. For fans who live near popular tour stops, it’s strange to have a live experience after a song’s moment has passed. It’s not the only temporal anomaly people have reported experiencing since the pandemic began, and certainly not the most important one, but we may have crossed a threshold where the new and novel crossed over into nostalgia. 

A slew of bands have announced tours for this summer, fall and winter, and only a few of them have new music released within the past 360 days or so. Even fewer of them are new names (you’ll notice a lot of 21st and 22nd anniversary tours mixed in with this year’s 20-year nostalgia acts). This is in line with another trend in music: out with the new, in with the old.

The record industry has been shifting to their existing catalog for revenue. Now that they don’t need to compete for physical space on record store shelves to find listeners, every recording a publisher owns can potentially provide a return on investment indefinitely. It’s part of why you see so many artists giving up the rights to their catalogs recently – Bob Dylan, the estates of David Bowie and John Lennon, Shakira, Fleetwood Mac, Julian Casablancas of the Strokes, Bruce Springsteen and more have sold some or all of the rights to their music in the past few years. There are a lot of intricacies and caveats to how intellectual property rights work with songwriting, recording, and performance, but it’s clear that the industry is priming itself to make a lot of money on music it’s already paid to produce. 

If you can make more money selling remasters of classic 70s tracks to movie studio music supervisors than you will trying to find the Next Big Thing, is the live music world going to follow? Can it? 

Are we reaching a point where touring is prohibitively expensive, unless an artist can show some amount of sustained success without it? Smaller venues have been operating under this model for a while, whether it’s pay-to-play or based on polling the door, and bands with a bigger existing audience bring in more money (ie “are better”) than bands who don’t bring a huge crowd. But over the past few years, a lot of those venues have closed. Those that remain are now facing two things that are going to fuck up any merging artists’ plans. A massive backlog of legacy touring acts trying to book dates, combined with club owners’ desire to make up lost revenue stemming from pandemic restrictions and quarantine, means there’s no room for taking risks on artists who might not draw a crowd.

We’ve long past the point where — at least for a certain tier of artist — corporate promoters dictate who opens on whose tour, who’s headlining the Impossible Whopper Stage at The Big Summer Festival, and venues of a certain size operate under virtual monopolies thanks to Ticketmaster. It won’t be too long until the music industry finally admits that new bands doing original things aren’t really worth the investment, especially not when people will pay just as much to see a hologram dance along to the classics (maybe I can finally see Nirvana!). 

It’s been weird enough living through the creation of “alternative rock” and “classic rock” as subgenres loosely divided by the release date of Nirvana’s “Nevermind,” and the eventual dragging of bands from “alternative” to “classic” as the 20-year anniversaries passed. But I think we’ve gotten to a point where all rock is classic. 

Rock isn’t dead, but it’s 80-years-old and probably would have retired 20 years ago if it weren’t for all the money. 

The biggest tours sell tickets on nostalgia (or fear that Paul’s getting a bit old and he might not make it back again). The most successful new bands and albums are mostly retreads of well-established sounds: a few guitars, a bass, a drum kit, maybe a piano or something, and stick to pentatonic scales. Some bands seem to relish in copping classic riffs and sounds, others find novel approaches to classic ideas, but when it comes down to it, LiveNation isn’t out there promoting The Next Big Thing in Rock’n’Roll**. They’re out there trotting out the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Bruce Springsteen, the Strokes, and (once they get the rights ironed out) the Ghosts of David Bowie and John Lennon. 

Rock music has become like the blues: a niche subgenre repackaging and selling old ideas because the classics get butts into seats, best represented by an old man in sunglasses and a snappy suit holding a guitar. It wavers between feeling timeless and feeling completely outside of time, a phenomenon exacerbated by a global pandemic that seems in many ways to have put time on pause.

But then again… what’s more rock’n’roll than doing something the blues has already been doing for decades? What year is this? 

*In a recent Rolling Stone article about Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins, concerns were raised about the band’s grueling tour schedule, which was usually between 60 and 70 shows per year, and included some 40 tour dates between 2019 and 2021, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

**This is because The Next Big Thing isn’t in rock’n’roll, and hasn’t been for at least 20 years. It’s someone like Bad Bunny or Dua Lipa or a rapper/producer you haven’t heard of yet. It’s definitely not a skinny white haircut with a guitar.

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