There is a kind of music origin story that fans talk about in a very particular way.
The National playing a bar in Cincinnati to forty people in 2003. Arctic Monkeys on their first US run before anyone outside Sheffield had caught up. Phoebe Bridgers at a small room in Los Angeles before Funeral made that kind of discovery feel impossible.
The details change, but the feeling doesn't.
The music industry is good at capturing artists once the story becomes legible, when the venues get bigger and the infrastructure quickly follows.
The moment before that, when the artist is still finding the shape of what they're making, tends to disappear.
At Bootleg most of our energy to this point has been spent building around established artists and their super-fan bases, giving people something to hold onto that compounds long after the show ends.
That work continues. But we've been working on something new to capture the specific kind of magic that happens when you experience artists on the rise before they become household names.
We're partnering with our friends at Big Ass Kids to launch 'Remember When', a recurring showcase series at small, iconic venues featuring curated lineups of emerging artists. These shows will have a special home inside the Bootleg app and our intention it to capture those 'lightning in a bottle' moments that later become the stuff of legend.
We're kicking it off this weekend at Big: Culture & Arts Festival in downtown Gainesville. On Sunday we'll have our own stage at How Bazar, a venue that's become one of the anchors of Gainesville's creative community.
We're recording sets from six emerging artists whose names you may not know yet, which is exactly why we're there.
Every artist we love has a night like that somewhere in their history, one which only became significant later, when the story caught up to what was actually happening.
Remember When is built around the idea that we don't have to wait for the story to catch up.
