Paully’s Vapefest 2016 Playlists and Other Things

I once again announced Gloucester, it was really great, and it was once again dry.

The @gpgloucester is smoother, faster and greener than it's ever been!

lol jk its still a mean-ass pile of dust and rocks deal with it

— Paully B (@ULTRAPaully) October 14, 2016

(This tweet is too perfect, so I am not going to bother attempting to make a better joke than it, and yes I am leading off my blog post with a tweet someone else made)

You can read about what happened in the races elsewhere on the internet, and honestly my brain has like three hours of rotating memory for these things so, sorry, I can’t tell you anything other than “Curtis White is very good, so are Ellen Noble and Helen Wyman and I was sad that Ellen didn’t race on day two also Dylan had a fantastic start on day two”.

Okay those were several things.

The courses were very similar to last year, with the exception of the ATOMIC CAFE COFFEE ZONE being right in front of the ANNOUNCING ZONE so naturally I had at least six espressos each day. Also the beer tent was closer.

Frankie Andreu (of “actual day job talking about bikes” and “former director of Rock Racing” fame) was the other half of the announcing crew, and as he is not from New England I got to inform him of things like the Facconezone and the Scrubzone and various other zones that are native to NECX.

I ALSO PLAYED A BUNCH OF MUSIC which is really why you are here.

I make a few specific playlists for big events like this, depending on the promoter’s tastes, who is in the field (yeah I wouldn’t ordinarily play “Kings of Metal” at a bike race, but if Mike Wissell is racing, then I am), what people on Twitter have asked for and taking into the account the venue/crowd (White Park and families vs. Night Weasels and a full beer garden).

The 45+ lists are what I played last year (LAZY RYAN! BAD RYAN!), but I think they are pretty great and only got played once, so I put them on there again. I guess now I’ll have to change it up for 2017…damnit. the 45+ race is Paul’s race, so you’ll see that influence (pandering?) in there.

If you follow me on Twitter, you may have seen me waxing poetic about music released in 1994. The 35+ guys would have been in their formative years in 1994, so I thought “hey maybe that will be a fun thing to do.” Note that the 35+ race is also the Junior Men’ race, so…yeah they might have been less impressed with the inspiration here.

For the UCI races, I put in some stuff that I thought would be good to race bikes to.

Then there’s the “General” playlist, which is just over nine hours of stuff that I’ve liked or found in the last year. Spotify is great for this – it makes discovering music and exploring similar artists/sounds so easy. I just save tracks, and when it’s playlist building time, I go through what I’ve liked in the last few months (along with what people say they want to hear) and start going from there. This was partially played at Night Weasels, too.

So if you’re at any of the other events I’m doing this year – Orchard Cross and Ice Weasels (does that even have a date or venue yet?) – you’ll probably hear a lot of these tracks – just a heads up!