The West Coast Is Calling
a.k.a. The book tour continues, plus a few goodies to keep you busy while First Floor is on the road.
Greetings from Washington DC.
I’ve officially reached the halfway point of my North American book tour—in case you’re wondering, it’s been quite fun so far—and in a few hours I’ll be hopping a plane to Los Angeles. My talk there happens tomorrow, and kicks off a sprint up and down the West Coast that will be happening throughout the rest of this week.
The remaining tour itinerary is below. Have you secured your spot yet? Space will be limited at many of these venues, so don’t wait until the last minute.
(Click the individual links for more details and ticket / RSVP info.)
September 27 - Los Angeles, Late Breakfast at 2220 Arts + Archives (moderated by Laurel Halo)
September 28 - Seattle, Vermillion (moderated by Doc Sleep)
September 29 - Portland, Colleen (live) at Holocene (moderated by Spencer Doran)
September 30 - San Francisco, Public Works (moderated by Christina Chatfield)
As you might expect, all this travel has thrown a wrench into my usual newsletter routine, which means that this will be the only First Floor mailout this week. (I hope to get back to my regular publishing schedule once the book tour has wrapped up, but let’s see exactly what sort of shape I’m in after I’ve finished bouncing through ten cities in eight days.)
In the meantime, however, I do have a few things that will hopefully keep you entertained during the days ahead:
I recently had a long chat with Vivian Host for her essential Rave to the Grave podcast, and the episode featuring that conversation went live just a few days ago. Vivian and I are old friends; aside from working together at places like XLR8R and Red Bull Music Academy, we actually first crossed paths more than 20 years ago when we were both volunteering at the same college radio station. (Shout out KALX 90.7 FM in Berkeley.) As such, she knows a lot about me, both personally and professionally, and used that know-how to dig deep into my past, which got me talking about many of my early forays into music, raving, radio, DJing and journalism. It’s not often I get asked to turn back the clock that far, so it was really fun to stretch out with an old friend and tell a few silly / embarrassing stories from my younger days.
Speaking of reunions with old friends, while in New York last week I had the chance to link up with Mona Dehghan, who’s currently a bigwig at Mute Records but once upon a time was my assistant at KALX. (I swear, the extended KALX network runs deep.) Mona also hosts a weekly show at WFMU, and she was kind enough to invite me to join her for an interview and a mini guest DJ set. We recorded it before my official book talk at Nowadays, and the full episode, which first aired last Friday, has been archived here. The conversation did mostly focus on First Floor, but we had a lot of laughs and there was some good banter throughout.
Given that Laurel Halo’s new album Atlas just dropped last Friday, and she’ll also be moderating my book talk in Los Angeles tomorrow, I figured that now would be a good time to re-circulate her First Floor interview that was first published last month. I’ve taken down the paywall—the article will be available for everyone to read for free through the end of the week—and for anyone who missed it the first time around, we talked about the new record, her unexpected foray into teaching, moving to LA, the current state of dance music and lots more.
That’s all I’ve got for today. Thanks so much for bearing with me as I do these book tours. It’s honestly been so refreshing to meet people IRL and forge some new connections on the road, but I’m also well aware that these newsletter mailouts are what made all of that possible in the first place. I’m having fun now, but things will get “back to normal” around here soon.
Have a great week.
Shawn
Shawn Reynaldo is a freelance writer, editor, presenter and project manager. Find him on LinkedIn and Twitter, or you can just drop him an email to get in touch about projects, collaborations or potential work opportunities.