Austin City Limits, more commonly known as ACL, is an annual music festival that I've got more history with than any other. During the seven years I lived in San Antonio I made it to ACL no less than five times, 2013, '15, '16, '17, and '18, over which I slowly witnessed the festival evolve, watching the grounds expand, and seeing so many artists of different genres and at different stages of their careers.

Then, right after the 2018 edition, I moved an ocean away to Stuttgart, Germany, which is why I never made it to ACL in 2019. In some alternate universe where the pandemic never happened, I might have gone in 2020. Originally I was supposed to move back at some point in the fall of 2020, and I'd hoped I could make it to ACL right after landing in the States. But then the COVID pandemic broke out and caused everything to get cancelled, including ACL, and my move to get delayed a few months.

When ACL 2021 was announced, I had been relocated to mostly-insignificant Clovis, New Mexico. That would be a bit of a long drive from Austin, but still feasible, so I had to go to this one. Apparently a lot of other people were eager to go back to ACL because it sold out before I could get my ticket in! But hope was not lost because I was able to buy a resold weekend 2 GA wristband, though for a much higher price.

It showed up on my doorstep late in September, about a week after I had returned from my two months in Maryland.

Getting to Austin was going to take much, much longer than it used to back in the San Antonio days. Instead of spending upwards of 90 minutes sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic on I-35, it was now going to be a long, grueling eight-hour road trip through the vast, (mostly) empty void of west Texas. While I would do the return trip all in one day, I decided to break up the journey there into two parts. Thursday evening I left Clovis, New Mexico, crossed the state line and lost an hour, stopped for dinner in Lubbock, and eventually spent the night at a hotel in Abilene.

The drive from Clovis to Abilene took about four hours, most of it in total darkness. There were no city lights to be found outside the thinly distributed towns in between Lubbock and Abilene. The only light came from my headlights and those of the occasional passing cars, and from the stars above. This made me think of Star Trek. If you're a Trek fan, imagine having to take a four-hour interstellar journey in a shuttlecraft, which are usually depicted as being about the size of a van, from whatever starship you live on to one starbase or another. For that whole time there's nothing to be seen outside your window except the stars. This is what it feels like to drive on I-20 in the dark in west Texas.

Friday, October 8, 2021

After the last night of hightailing it to Abilene in the dark, I resolved to "stop and smell the roses" on Friday's drive. One way I like to do this is to stop at a winery if I see a sign directing me to one, especially if this winery is out in the middle of nowhere. While driving down US Highway 183, more than halfway between Abilene and Austin, passing through Liberty Hill, a small town I'd hitherto never heard of, I found a sign directing me to the Thirsty Mule Winery. OK, seems like a nice diversion...

I had a little bit of a wine tasting there and bought a bottle of something I thought tasted pretty good. And since there was not only the Thirsty Mule Winery there but also the Schitz Creek Distillery (nice name), I also got a bottle of maple syrup whiskey. They both proved to be OK but not too impressive. For Thanksgiving over a month later I brought the wine to my parents' place and it tasted just a little too sweet and rich at the same time. As for the whiskey, it works great as an additive to coffee or cocoa, but straight it's just awful, it's too sweet and bitter at the same time.

Not long after my winery diversion, I drove into Austin from the northwest. Almost exactly three years had passed since I last departed this city. Everything looked just like I remembered, except for one disconcerting difference: homeless encampments--tent villages--under some of the highway overpasses. Now, for almost all of the 2010's I'd heard words like "unaffordability" and "gentrification" applied to Austin, but tent villages? This was THE first time I'd ever seen anything like that in Austin. Unaffordability may have been a problem for the last decade, but clearly it had risen to a whole new level during my absence. We'll revisit this a little later.

I checked into my hotel, the Rodeway Inn near the intersection of I-35 and US-290. This was not the nicest hotel but then it was a Rodeway, not a Holiday Inn Express. With my things secured in the room and the car parked outside it, I hiked east along the Highway 290 access road to Cameron Road where I caught a bus bound for downtown. And after reaching downtown...

The Texas state capitol seen from Congress Street.

I couldn't believe how many familiar places stood out to me. I'd never lived in Austin, I'd only ever visited while living 60 miles away in San Antonio. But still, walking through here I kept thinking, I've been there, I've been there, I stopped in that store once, I stayed in that hotel... Instead of taking the shuttle bus directly to the festival, I opted to walk all the way to the gates, which meant walking over a bridge over the Colorado River, the Ann Richards Congress Avenue Bridge. That's the same bridge I walked over, in the same direction, to get back to my car after the 2018 Austin Half Marathon. Then I had to keep walking west along Barton Springs Road, which I'd walked along before in both directions during many past ACL's, and hey, there's that one bar where I went to a Match.com event back in 2013...

I should mention here that on Congress I walked past a Belgian beer bar called Mort Subite which I'd never seen before, and made a mental note to return later.

After all the walking, and all the flashbacks, I arrived here...

WOW, that's a real tightly packed crowd! In this age of Covid that may look a little worrisome, but since everyone entering the festival had to show proof of vaccination, I didn't feel too vulnerable.

As you might have expected from the size of that crowd outside the gates, getting inside took awhile. But I finally made it.

So much had happened in the last three years, but seeing this, it felt like I'd never left. That big tent on the left is the Barton Springs Beer Hall, and the Tito's Handmade Vodka stage is just to the right of center.

Everything here looked just like I remembered it, too. The Barton Springs Beer Hall was right there where I last left it, serving up all those delicious craft brews. All the stages were back in the same places as before, although three had been renamed: the small Barton Springs stage, near where I entered, had become the Vrbo stage, the stage I had previously only ever known as Homeaway was now the T-Mobile stage, and the big headliner stage that had once been the American Express stage in 2017 and 2018, and in even earlier years had been the Samsung stage, had now been redubbed the Ladybird stage. The food court was back, too, with its amazing selection of cuisines.

I don't think I've ever discussed the expansive food court they always have at ACL, called ACL Eats. It's one of the best things about ACL, because you can find almost any kind of food imaginable. There are stands there set up by my favorite Austin food truck Shawarma Point, south Texas institution Torchy's Tacos, Flyrite Chicken, Four Brothers Venezuelan Kitchen, Tacodeli, Sno-Beach Sno-Cones, Southside Flying Pizza, Skull & Cakebones, Lambas Indian Kitchen, Mmmpanadas, Bananarchy, Wicky's Wallop Muffulettas & Tots, The Mighty Cone, Kababeque...the full list would take up a lot more space.  For my first dinner at this festival in three years, I had to go back to Shawarma Point for a chicken shawarma plate.

There weren't a whole lot of artists I was interested in seeing on Friday. The only one I really wanted to see was Lane 8, an EDM producer, at the Tito's Handmade Vodka stage.

After Lane 8, I thought about what to do next and amazingly enough I actually decided to leave right then. There were no other artists playing that I was interested in, and, mostly I just wanted to get to that Belgian beer bar.

I had no less than four beers at Mort Subite: Chimay Grande Reserve, Straffe Hendrik Quad, Piraat Draft, and Delirium Deliria. Belgium makes some of the best beers in the world, so I'm definitely recommending this place to any beer lovers visiting Austin. And I also met some interesting people there: there was a group of tourists who were a bit older than me and were visiting from Wisconsin. One of them told me about a music festival that happens every year in Milwaukee, called Milwaukee Summerfest. He said it was "the original music festival" and that he had seen a bunch of 80s bands like Tesla at this festival before they became popular. I'd never heard of Summerfest before but now I'm thinking I might have to find my way up there in the near future.

Saturday, October 9, 2021

I got my breakfast Saturday morning from an IHOP which was within walking distance, though part of that walk was on a sidewalk next to a highway overpass which itself ran under an even higher overpass...one thing Austin is locally semi-famous for is its two-level stretch of I-35. Anyway this IHOP, after sitting down inside, started to look just as familiar as so many other things in the city, as I soon realized that, just like so many places yesterday, I'd been there before.

Some time later I caught the same bus as yesterday by the Cameron/290 stop to get downtown. Unlike Friday, I wasn't going to do the long walk to the Barton Springs entrance and instead rode one of the shuttle buses leaving from Republic Square.

My lunch that day came from a great stand at the food court, Four Brothers Venezuelan Kitchen. I'd had their food once before at one of their trucks in downtown Austin and liked it then. This time I had a vegan bowl, which was made with rice, black beans, plantains, and avocado sauce. Loved it. Next time I'm in Austin I'll have to be on the lookout for the Four Brothers truck.

Today most everyone whose sets I wanted to catch were at the end of the night, except for one, who was starting really early at 2:00 pm. Before that set started, I listened to Holly Humberstone at the Ladybird stage for a little bit, then walked over to a new stage that hadn't been there last time I was at ACL: Bonus Tracks.

This stage hosted only three events each day, but it was an interesting expansion to ACL's atmosphere. At this time here on Saturday afternoon, KUTX, a public radio station based at the University of Texas, broadcast their show Pause/Play from the Bonus Tracks stage. They had a discussion about what city might be the "next Austin."

Throughout the weekend, Bonus Tracks also hosted other KUTX discussion shows as well as an aerobic dance workshop from Melody DanceFit, and performances as varied as Bob's Dance Shop (a dance crew that appeared on America's Got Talent) and Best of Austin Drag. If I'm ever back at a future ACL I'll have to spend more time here.

Now onto that first set at 2pm that I couldn't miss...

This is LP Giobbi. I only found out about her during the months of lockdown, when I listened to her regular livestreamed "House Hymns" sets on Insomniac's YouTube channel. She also runs a nonprofit called Femme House which aims to get more women into electronic music production.

Throughout Saturday, I saw a lot of artists who I was just discovering at that moment, who I liked at the time but haven't kept up with much since. After LP, I caught the end of Girl in Red's set at Ladybird. I'd never heard of her before but what I heard here was pretty good, and I liked the last song of the set, "Bad Idea."

White Reaper, playing here on the Miller Lite stage, was an OK punk band.

Samantha Sánchez on the BMI stage. I liked what I heard here. Most of her music sounds synth-pop-ish, while some of it is more like hip hop, and it's almost all in Spanish.

I stopped by the T-Mobile stage for some of Remi Wolf's catchy pop tunes.

Now on to a band I'd been planning on seeing that day.

Here's Future Islands on the Honda stage. They're an indie synth-pop band who have been around a lot longer than I was aware. I first discovered them at Float Fest in 2016. I stayed here for this whole set.

And here's another new artist I'd just discovered here, RnB singer Raiche (pronounced "resh").

One of my favorite drinks available at ACL, High Brew cold brew coffee. You could get two different types, the double espresso seen here and Mexican vanilla.

I had to stop and rest for a while at the Barton Springs Beer Hall. It's Saturday so there's college football games on: TCU at Texas Tech and Iowa at Penn State. There were, interestingly, quite a lot of Iowa fans here.

After getting a spicy lamb wrap from Lambas Indian Kitchen, I stepped a few yards away from the food court for the Hu at the Tito's Handmade Vodka stage. They're the only band I know of from Mongolia, though I think they're based in the UK right now. Their sound could be described as traditional Mongolian music meets rock.

Saturday night at ACL 2021 had something in common with Saturday night at ACL 2017, four years ago: Alison Wonderland and Rüfüs Du Sol were playing back to back. But since then their profiles have clearly grown, because both artists were promoted to bigger stages than last time. Back in 2017, Alison was on the Tito's Handmade Vodka stage at 6, and then Rüfüs took Homeaway at 7. This time around, it was Alison Wonderland who was on the T-Mobile stage--the former Homeaway--at 7:20, while Rüfüs du Sol had graduated to being a headliner at Honda an hour later.

The best photo I could get of Alison Wonderland. Her sound has evolved a bit since I last saw her at Tomorrowland. This set had a bit of a darker feel to it.

Finally, Rüfüs Du Sol. I'd seen them twice before, first was right here at ACL in 2017 when they had two albums out, and the second was at Electric Forest in 2018 not long before their third release Solace. Now in 2021, they'd just released their fourth album Surrender and so had new songs for this set, like "Next To Me" and "On My Knees" in addition to all the highlights from the last three.

I had two photos of Rüfüs, and couldn't decide which one was better, so here they both are.

After Rüfüs I headed for the exit. I thought for a second about maybe seeing the rest of Billie Eilish over at the Ladybird stage, but decided I didn't want to get caught up in the huge crowd that would be exiting the fest once that set finished.

Check this out, a Euphoria sticker on the back of a Walk/Don't Walk sign on Sixth Street.

After the last night of the festival in 2018, I'd met a local friend for my last beer in Texas before flying off to Germany. Tonight we met up again at a bar on Sixth Street where he told me about how Austin had been changing in the last three years with transplants moving in from places like New York, L.A., and Miami. The city has been getting more expensive, leading to the people living in the tents I saw under the highway overpasses. "Austin is turning into Miami," he said.

Sunday, October 10, 2021

Sunday morning I had breakfast at IHOP again, and did some grocery shopping at Central Market--a chain of organic stores owned by H-E-B--to stock up on things like tempeh and German beer that one can't find in Clovis, New Mexico. There wasn't anyone on the lineup that I was interested in seeing until later in the afternoon, so I wasn't in a hurry to get back into the festival.

I tried to get downtown by a different route than on the last two days. First I took a different bus than the day before to Crestview Station, with the intention of riding the MetroRail from there. As I stepped off the bus and saw the park benches on the train boarding platform, I had yet another flashback and realized I'd also been to this place before, after the last night of ACL 2017 when I'd been riding the train north, missed my stop at the Highland Station, and stepped off here instead.

But now, the MetroRail wasn't running! At that time at least, they didn't run the trains on Sunday. What gives? Since I couldn't ride the train, I had to spend about a half hour waiting for another bus, route 801. This bus was branded "MetroRapid." I'd heard before that Austin was planning to start up a bus rapid transit line, but this wasn't that. MetroRapid was simply a bus that stops at only the most-used stops and skips all the others. This should have made the trip faster, but unfortunately the bus got bogged down in traffic jams as it got close to downtown. But, that wasn't much of a problem since, again, I wasn't in a hurry.

I had lunch at a downtown restaurant called Shiner. This place seemed to be a hangout for, of all people, Pittsburgh Steelers fans. There were Steelers flags all over the place, a Steelers game on the TVs, and a good deal of the people there were wearing Steelers jerseys. What I had for lunch here was pretty good, a Greenhorn Salad ("Leaf lettuce, jack cheese, onions, avocado, chopped bacon, hickory smoked turkey, and your choice of dressing") and a Shiner Octoberfest beer.

OK, now it's time to go into the festival. I rode the shuttle bus in like on Saturday. The first place I visited was the merch tents where I got two shirts. One was a Madeon shirt from the artist merch store, and then in the much larger festival store I got an ACL shirt with this year's lineup on the back.

Speaking of shirts, the one I was wearing on that day was the shirt I got at Euphoria 2016. I got a few compliments on it. I even met a couple other people that weekend who were wearing their own Euphoria shirts. There's quite a lot of people who really miss Euphoria.

The first of four artists I was here for tonight: Chris Lake on the Miller Lite stage. He spun all his dancefloor bangers that I knew, like "I Want You" and "Turn Off The Lights," as well as his recent collaboration with Grimes, "A Drug From God."

Immediately after Chris Lake I headed over to Ladybird for Greta Van Fleet. This is a bombastic rock band from Michigan whose sound recalls the days of '70s excess. So, pretty much what The Darkness was doing 20 years ago. Not that that's a bad thing! The '70s were a great rock era of larger-than-life rockstars and Greta Van Fleet seem to channel it pretty well. Their singer has some serious pipes.

Next, I zipped back to Miller Lite for Madeon as the sun was setting. This was a set I couldn't miss. Five years earlier, Madeon and Porter Robinson had played a set together at ACL, right after they had released their track "Shelter," but because someone else who I couldn't miss was playing at the exact same time, I only could catch the first half of their set. So now I've partially made up for that; I'll get to see Porter later in 2022 at Electric Forest.

One of Madeon's more memorable visuals. I wonder, does any of this alien-looking text actually mean anything? Are there encoded Easter eggs on this screen, or is it all randomness?

In the days after the festival I downloaded Madeon's 2019 album Good Faith and it's really grown on me.

And finally, Sunday night's Honda stage headliner, '80s icons Duran Duran. I'm not quite old enough to have experienced their heyday, but I'm familiar with all their hits from back then. One of the first songs they played was "Hungry Like The Wolf." They went through just about every song they're famous for, including but not limited to "Wild Boys," "Save A Prayer," "A View To A Kill," and "Notorious," going back to the beginning of their career with "Planet Earth," and reminding us that they weren't completely confined to the 1980s with the two hits from their 1992 comeback album, "Come Undone" (in which backup singer Anna Ross sang the chorus) and "Ordinary World," their 1993 cover of Grandmaster Flash's "White Lines (Don't Do It)," 2004's "Reach Up For The Sunrise," and several more newer songs I didn't recognize. Singer Simon Le Bon's voice hasn't deteriorated at all and still sounds like it did back in the day.

Near the end of their set, Duran Duran went through about 3/4 of "Girls On Film," and then bled this into an unexpected cover, Calvin Harris' "Acceptable In The '80s." At the end of that one, the band kept playing the instrumental break in a loop as Simon introduced the band members: backup singers Erin Stevenson and Anna Ross, saxophonist Simon Willescroft, guitarist Tom Brown, drummer Roger Taylor, keyboardist Nick Rhodes, bassist John Taylor, and finally... "and my name is Bon. Simon Le Bon. That's French, you know."

There was only time for one more song. "What do you want to hear, Texas?!" Well, we're in Texas, so of course it has to be "Rio."

So overall, ACL this year was a great experience. It was my second festival since the pandemic started, and I enjoyed it a lot more than Electric Zoo in NYC a month earlier. Compared to past ACLs, it wasn't my favorite, which is still a tie between 2016 and 2018, but it's definitely up there. Also I liked the addition of the Bonus Tracks stage which I'll have to spend more time at whenever I return.

Monday morning I had a long eight-hour drive ahead of me. It's not 2017 anymore and home is no longer an hour and a half away in San Antonio.

This is actually from a subway station in Brooklyn, but I felt it really fit here.