Summary

This week at the Dive Bar Music Club, we meet one of the Regulars, the incredible Rachel Cholst, who’s here to take us on a deep dive into the colorful world of queer country and Americana. Get ready for some surprising insights and music recommendations, including jazz for non-historians.

As we sip on our metaphorical cocktails and kick back, Rachel Cholst helps us explore the magic of live music venues and how they create a sense of community, especially for those of us who don’t fit the cis het white dude roots music scene mold. And if you're a fan of Lilith Fair 90s vibes, you're in for a treat, as we also chat about how the past has shaped the music we love today.

Dive in to broad influences from peers to NPR with Rachel Cholst.

Links

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Dive Bar Music Club

03:12 Entering the Music World

04:53 The Intersection of Music and Identity

07:23 The Importance of Community Spaces in Live Music

09:53 Exploring the Music Scene in Upper Manhattan

13:17 Introduction to Dive Bar Music Club

Takeaways

Vibrant, Inclusive Vibes: Dive Bar Music Club is the ultimate hangout for music lovers of all kinds, where everyone can share their current obsessions and discover fresh new tunes
Community & Live Venues Matter: We chat about why live music venues are more than just places to hear music. They create a sense of community for both fans and artists, and that’s what makes the music scene so special.
Queer Country & Americana: We dive into genres like queer country and Americana, exploring how they reflect personal stories and cultural shifts, making for some pretty deep and powerful music.
Witty Banter & Musical History: Expect fun conversations mixed with deep dives into music history. We’ll navigate how genres and identities blend together to shape today’s music scene.

Recommended If You Like

Dive Bar Music Club, Rachel Cholst, Americana music, queer country, 90s alt rock, indie music podcasts, emerging songwriters, underground music scenes, live music venues, music communities, music recommendations, music reviews, jazz influences, Southern rock, intersectionality in music, music blogging, music playlists, artist highlights, cultural music discussions, music nerd culture, Yahoo, Pandora, No Depression, Good Country, Two Cow Garage, Karen and the Sorrows, Rainbow Rodeo, Penny Jo's, Rockwood Music Hall, Lilith Fair, Bad Bunny, Alt Latino, Adobe and Teardrops

Transcript

Speaker A

00:00:00.960 - 00:00:05.120

Hey, everybody, this is Rachel Cholst, and you're listening to Dive Bar Music Club.

Speaker B

00:00:05.760 - 00:00:52.390

Welcome to the Dive Bar Music Club podcast, where the guest hosts drop in and out, but the opinions are always passionate and the playlists loud. It's like cheers if everyone at the bar had a strong take on 90s alt rock or a suspicious number of burned CDs.

Around our table you'll find an emerging touring songwriter, a former cult band favorite whose work since then is even more interesting, a portrait photographer with a not so secret metal penchant, a record store owner who learned about Swifties the hard way, a retired folk singer who regrets nothing, and a zine maker with more cool music projects than we can count.

We're all just here to share what we're currently obsessed with and maybe convince someone that, yes, that weird Icelandic synth folk band is worth a listen.

Speaker C

00:00:52.790 - 00:00:54.550

Okay, that last one's probably me.

Speaker B

00:00:54.710 - 00:01:01.950

Sloane Spencer. It's Dive Bar Music Club. Low key, high taste happy hour for music nerds.

Speaker C

00:01:02.510 - 00:01:08.990

Rachel Cholst, I am so excited to have you be part of Dive Bar Music Club. What are you up to in the world of music these days?

Speaker A

00:01:09.710 - 00:01:34.600

Hey, Sloane, thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited to just nerd out with all my Twitter ati bluesky ati people.

Now you can find me editing Rainbow Rodeo, the only queer country site zine. And you'll also find my work in no Depression. I have a monthly column there, as well as the Nashville scene and good country from time to time.

Speaker C

00:01:35.080 - 00:01:54.230

I'm so excited to have you be part of this. I have learned so much about music that I otherwise would not have known, and for me, the barrier was the country part of it.

You know, I'm not really a country music fan and you've really opened my ears to some fantastic work over the years. So I'm really excited to learn more about what you're listening to these days with Die Bar Music Club.

Speaker A

00:01:54.870 - 00:02:18.070

Thanks. I've actually been listening to a lot of jazz in my free time.

I think 20 years of writing about Americana and country and roots rock has kind of made me really hate three chord songs. I'm just kidding.

But I think, you know, I'm definitely excited to expand my own horizons because I know you've got a lot of people with really exciting tastes coming onto the podcast as well.

Speaker C

00:02:18.640 - 00:02:30.480

That's the plan is that hopefully we all like different things, but we all have enough of an overlap to be able to turn people onto other things. I'm super into like early 1970s soul jazz. It's like comfort music for me.

Speaker A

00:02:31.200 - 00:02:40.800

Yeah, totally.

And you know, when I say queer country for Rainbow Rodeo, that's just because it's a nice alliteration, you know, it's mostly Americana, I think, is how we would describe it nowadays.

Speaker C

00:02:41.280 - 00:02:52.830

Sure. And I think that's important to clarify for folks, because if you're like me and you're like, I don't listen to country music, I'm not sure.

I've told the listeners of this particular podcast. I worked in pop country for 25 years. I've listened to plenty of country music in my life.

Speaker A

00:02:53.550 - 00:03:04.670

Yeah. For pop country, I don't really listen to it as much in my free time either.

But it is interesting to see, like, the sort of 90s sounds come back into fashion, for better or worse. Agreed there.

Speaker C

00:03:04.670 - 00:03:19.570

Yeah, I think we'll probably end up chatting about that at some point in an upcoming podcast because that's come up in a couple of these different little bio conversations. So, Rachel Coelst, we've known each other digitally for a pretty long time, but how did you end up working in the world of music?

Speaker A

00:03:20.290 - 00:05:23.469

I'm a millennial, kind of right there in the middle, born in 1988. So I was like in my tweens when the Internet became a thing.

And so I was just kind of used to if I liked something, doing what I could to find everything about it. And as much as streaming has really been damaging to the music industry, I think it's been great for music listeners.

I never would have found my way into altcountry in Americana if it wasn't for services like Yahoo. Radio and Pandora. Try to keep it really brief. I am like New York City kid.

My family is like third generation in Ellis island, so there's no real particular roots in what you would consider like classical country music. They don't listen to it, but I just really fell in love with sort of Southern rock and twang, for whatever reason.

And as I got older and my own politics continued to develop, I found myself gravitating towards this sort of intersection between punk and country and singer songwriting.

So not necessarily so much like the Bloodshot record bands that are really in your face, but those bands that were kind of made famous on the revival tour or artists so like Tucal, Garage, Lucero, those kinds of people.

And I noticed as I was going to more and more shows, as I was reading more and more blogs about those artists, they were almost universally featured straight white men. And I was almost always the only woman there at these shows who wasn't there with her boyfriend.

So I wanted to figure out who those other people were. This was also 2011, so kind of like as the ideas of intersectionality and like Occupy Wall street were all entering the mainstream.

So I decided to just start my own blog, Adobe and Teardrops, that tried to highlight artists of marginalized identities.

So queer artists, bipoc artists as we would call use the term now, and all people who are working somewhere within the root space and also just artists who I liked. So that also included like 2Cal Garage and Abigail Lucas and people like that.

Speaker C

00:05:24.270 - 00:05:44.760

And this is where I first discovered your work and I kind of gravitated into this f...