The Localist: The Northeast Megalopolis Pipeline

Posted by bigcityfolks on April 30, 2019 in The Localist, Uncategorized | 1 Comment

You may know of the northeast megalopolis as the socio-geographical designation of over 50 million inhabitants on the eastern seaboard, which includes the cities of (at least) Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington D.C. I’ve always been fascinated with the possibility of setting up a more formalized musician pipeline between the cities – especially as the cities are relatively easy to travel between by way of bus or train. In fact, I spent a bit of time traveling to most of these cities by bus a few years ago just to test it out. Let us refer to the implementation of this idea as The Northeast Megalopolis Pipeline.

I’m going to take another crack and setting the Northeast Megalopolis Pipeline up, but as part of my doing so, let me set out the basic details of what The Northeast Megalopolis Pipeline might look like.

1. First, you’d need to identify a substantial songwriters group in each city and set up a reliable form of communication with a designated representative of each city.
2. Second, the designated representative would communicate information on their local musicians who were performing in other cities of the Northern Megalopolis area.
3. Third, you would have a series of designated events (say once every other month) in which each city had performers from multiple cities who came to perform, paired with local performers. Alternatively a designated local booker could help set up shows for people sent through the pipeline by the designated representative.

The benefit would be in establishing connections in each city for people who wanted to perform in other cities of the Northeast Megalopolis. Currently, it is actually quite hard to get acquainted with the songwriter groups in the different cities. So, the Northeast Megalopolis Pipeline would facilitate touring for local musicians in each city who didn’t have the benefit of a booker. It would encourage interaction of good songwriters in each city. In fact, a songwriter could probably set up a tour of the Northeast Megalopolis quite easily.

The Northeast Megalopolis Pipeline.

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The Localist is a column focusing on issues relating to aspiring local musicians in New York City. In his free time, the author performs as St. Lenox. St. Lenox’s most recent record, “Ten Fables of Young Ambition and Passionate Love” was placed on Best Albums lists at Pop Matters and AllMusic. AllMusic credits St. Lenox with “some of the most unique and unconventionally thrilling pop music in the late 2010s.”