Review: The Energy Curfew Music Hour

They say the music you love is the music you listened to at 13. Somehow around that age, I fell into Nickel Creek and from there an expanse of bluegrass and folk. Don’t ask me how, I don’t really want to examine the turmoil that is being thirteen years old and getting into bluegrass of all things.

The name Chris Thile was the red string, connecting group to group, musical style to musical style, and beyond. I first saw him live at Hudson Valley Winery a few years ago, my first in-person, not work related concert with my partner. I have been following this mandolin player for years, on and off, and when The Energy Curfew Music Hour was in New York City I thought about going. I just couldn’t get up there with everything else happening in life. 

Luckily for me, this stage show became a podcast and I - along with everyone else, gets the joy of listening to this series of concerts from the comfort of their home and the convenience of their schedule. Which brings me to an important point of this review. I’m not here to say whether or not this is a podcast. It’s produced by Audible and released as a podcast. I’m not sure what else to call it with the way that it’s packaged. Is it mostly a concert? Yes. Are there points that bring it from a concert-podcast to fiction? Yes. So let’s get into it and then you can decide if you want to jump in. 

What is The Energy Curfew Music Hour? Step into a future New York City. The world is a vastly different place, and the entire power grid has to be shut down for a whole 24 hours to make massive updates. The hour before “dark day” is the Energy Curfew Music Hour hosted by Chris Thile and Punch Brothers. An acoustic show meant to ease the listener into their blessed electricity free 24 hours. 

Part satire, part comedy, but mostly a showing of musical prowess, this is a podcast where the listener is a part of this future. You can easily slip into the imagined future from wherever you are sitting. You are all set, listening to this radio show, prepared for the next twenty-four hours to be spent disconnected from the one thing we are wholly dependent on for society today. As you sink in and get used to what you’re hearing, you can imagine lighting the candle as you settle in, preparing for something most of us can’t imagine outside of catastrophe.

After a few episodes you find the rhythm of segments, bantering bits that take this from good, to breathtaking. The reality is, musically, they didn’t have to do much to make this impressive. I mean, James Taylor is a guest. If you don’t trust me on how good Punch Brothers is as a band, consider the guest list that also includes Louis Cato, Jason Isbell, and Kacey Musgraves. That speaks for itself as just a few names to consider on the long list of guests.

What doesn’t speak for itself is how this is activism wrapped up in comedy, music, and snappy writing. In this world, the music hour itself is produced by “The Department of Arts and Waste Management” which gives us a hint as to how this imagined future considers art. This is the same world that outlawed professional sports because of their carbon footprint, by the way. Stepping away from the jaw-dropping musical talent encompassed in each hour-long episode, the script and the in-between are subversively subtle. It’s tempting to laugh at each moment as ridiculous, but then it sinks in that maybe, maybe this future isn’t as ridiculous and as far off as we want to think.

I went to see Nickel Creek this year for their Celebrants Tour. There was a moment of the show that was introduced as instrumental because “there’s too much talking”. This podcast makes me think more about how maybe there’s too much, of everything. Maybe we need to pare back, not just to the acoustic, but to some degree of less…everything. Maybe what we need is the idea of 24 hours without being connected to everything and everyone, maybe we need music to ease us out, reconnecting for a disconnect. 

I never feel so connected with people as when I’m at a concert, tuning into the same music for some degree of emotional response. This podcast reaches back to the idea of live music over the radio. At one point, it was only airwaves connecting a world of far flung differences for a shared experience. Radio, podcasts, the internet, they still do that connecting. We can still have shared experiences across the world. I guess the question is when we decide to disconnect for the better, just like The Energy Curfew Music Hour.

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