Donation Page 

This Saturday and Sunday (7/16-17) Team Sub Pop starts biking from Seattle to Portland in support of the Northwest Parkinson’s Foundation, and we need YOUR help!

Since being diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in January of 2013, our Co-Founder and fearless leader Jonathan Poneman has done everything he can to show others that there is life beyond Parkinson’s. In a 2013 Seattle Times article, he states, “I accept that I have this disease, but that doesn’t give me the right to be passive.” He actually explains it as sort of a blessing. Parkinson’s has allowed him to “recalibrate” important values. “As ironic as it sounds, I am truly grateful to the disease,” and he explains further that, “My love of life and its precious elements became more vivid at the thought of seeing them fade away.” You can read more from Jonathan Poneman here, as he describes a very personal side to his Parkinson’s story.

In support of the many individuals and families affected by PD every year, Sub Pop Records employees will be raising money for the Northwest Parkinson’s Foundation (NWPF) by undertaking the fabled 204-mile Seattle to Portland (STP) Bicycle Classic. We hope you’ll take a moment to donate, and to spread the word about our fundraising efforts.

Donate to our team and we will enter you in a drawing for a hand-picked selection of Sub Pop greatest hits and rarities. From Nirvana’s Bleach to Band of Horses Everything All The Time to rare colored vinyl editions, Sub Pop fans are in for a treat. And, this week only, we will be throwing in mega-rare test pressings of Let’s Be Still by The Head and the Heart!

Your donation will benefit the Northwest Parkinson’s Foundation, which does great work on behalf of people suffering from Parkinson’s Disease. Please take a moment to visit our Sub Pop Team page and make a donation. Under ‘Honour Roll Options’ please select ‘Other (Custom)’ and enter “Sub Pop Giveaway (7/15/16)” in the note field. Winners will be notified shortly after 7/18. 

Thanks for being a part of our team!

Coming to you direct-ish from his Topanga Canyon studio, Morgan Delt just shared “The System of 1000 Lies,” another kaleidoscopic track from Phase Zero, his forthcoming Sub Pop debut.

In case you haven’t heard, Morgan Delt’s live show is a psychedelic smorgasbord for the ears and eyes; his international tour schedule for 2016 in support of Phase Zero resumes August 4th in Luxembourg-Bonnevoie at Rotondesbeen, and dates have now been extended through September 24th, with a show at Baby’s All Right in Brooklyn.  Delt and his band will tour both Europe (August 4th-20th) and North America (September 14th-24th) during this time. (Current schedule below.)

Phase Zero is available to preorder now (please do), and LP pre-orders through Sub Pop Mega Mart/independent retailers near you will receive the limited Loser Edition on red vinyl (while supplies last).

Tour Dates

After starting the year as an early-rising store opener, I’ve begun working closing shifts this month. One feature of closing that I’d forgotten about is the fugue state of the airport late at night. In the morning, people are hopped up on caffeine (or rushing towards its nearest source), moving at a brusque pace, hurtling towards their destinations, and reckoning with the reality of a 6AM flight.

At night, people walk slower. Flights have been delayed, and some folks have a long night ahead of them. Most people are trying to stay awake just long enough to board their plane. When you ask these wanderers “Hi, how are you?” the most common response you’ll hear is “I’m just killing time.” Eyeballs gaze over every single item for sale, as if in an effort to consume the most time as possible. But after one lap around the store, most of them exit to explore the next corner of the airport, with the deliberate restlessness of a tumbleweed. 

For the rare travelers that decide to hang out in the store, more often than not, they park themselves at our listening station bench. From here, they can sample different Sub Pop albums for sale, and also flip-through/write in our guestbooks. And after reading through our guestbooks for the first time in months, I found some entries that were too good to not share with the whole Sub Pop Interweb audience, who aren’t lucky enough to make it to the airport frequently. 

So please enjoy these assorted pages from our 2-year-old guestbooks, and make sure to write your own entry next time you visit us!

(Before Sleater-Kinney reunited and played for the first time in Spokane, WA, we had our fair share of far-flung fans stop by the airport store en route to the show. I think these S-K fans from Great Britain made the longest trip.) 

(“Making layovers somewhat passible since 1988” and a heartfelt message from Garrett.)

(Not to be out-done, thanks, Nora!)

(Naturally, rock star portraits abound in the guestbooks.)

(Once we got real celebrities to sign our guestbook. I don’t know why someone crossed out your name in this entry, but thanks, TacocaT!)

(Pictured: Two Sub Pop Corporate Associates With Party Hats and Balloons)

Sub Pop Airport Store 2nd Birthday Party Recap

May 1st. A day that is already full of holidays. Maybe you have spent prior firsts of May celebrating spring, erecting a maypole, and dancing in neo-pagan fertility rituals. Or perhaps you’ve been an ardent observer of International Workers’ Day, taking part in street marches and demonstrations (but maybe/hopefully you can agree with me that we should cut out of some these less imaginative pursuits.)

But now you can add another celebration to May 1st: The birthday of the Sub Pop Airport store! We are happy to share a birthday with fellow May Day babies like Jules Breton, Terry Southern, Judy Collins, Wes Anderson, and Jay Reatard, but I believe Sub Pop chose May 1st as our inauguration date because ‘mayday’ is an international signal for distress. And if a record label opening a store in an airport isn’t a cry for help, I don’t know what is!* 

In typical Sub Pop fashion, May 1st flew right by us on a Sunday last week (“Where the hell did May come from? It was April just yesterday”- me). It then took us a week to figure out how to properly commemorate our 2nd birthday. Eventually, plans were made, and we decided to bring a little festive spirit to the airport on this most recent Monday afternoon, May 9th 2016.  

Thank you to all the loyal customers who happened to be flying through Sea-Tac Airport bought plane tickets just to make it to our birthday party. Thank you to the members of the retail staff that took turns DJing their favorite Sub Pop singles. Without further ado, here is photographic evidence that we celebrated our 2nd birthday and delivered on all those promises we made earlier. 

(Photo appropriated from our friends @ Sea-Tac Airport)

(Free cupcakes! These disappeared pretty quickly.)

(Brnt Zza playin’ the hits.)

(Behind the decks with DJ Hookups)

(The store is currently holding auditions to join (this cut-out of) Nirvana. Do you think you have what it takes?)

(Here’s artist/illustrator Stacey Rozich, whose artwork can be found on the latest Father John Misty album, getting her photo taken at the store.)

(Our newest addition to the polaroid wall. Thanks, Stacey!)

(A visual sneak-peek of the Sub Pop Podcast, recording for Season 2 at the airport.)

(A free CD sampler, still available while supplies last. With your help, and patronage at our airport store, we can Make Sub Pop Great Again.)

*just some of that good ol’ patented Sub Pop Sarcasm for you! I love my job and kiss the ground that my overlords walk on. 

Celebrating Record Store Day 2016 at Sub Pop’s Airport Store

For the last few months, I have been one of the few Sub Pop corporate associates lucky enough to open the airport store at 6 A.M. For someone who has considered himself a night owl for his entire life, I’m amazed to see how many fully-alert and seemingly-functional human beings are roaming the airport at this hour. They are already munching on breakfast sandwiches, searching for electrical outlets to charge their phones, and staring at the black early morning sky through a 60-by-350-foot glass wall when I get to work. 

They are also ready to exercise their purchasing power, which brings us to 6 A.M., this Saturday, April 16th, in the year of our lord Grunge, where I will have the special sleep-deprived pleasure of opening our airport shop for Record Store Day (RSD). While other record stores tout their once-a-year early/extended hours, I can’t find any store that will beat our standard 6 A.M. opening time, making us still the earliest-opening record store in the galaxy. (The closest I found on the west coast was the Everyday Music location in Beaverton, OR, which promises to open at 7 A.M. this year for Record Store Day.) 

So, if you were worried about traveling through the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport on Record Store Day, and missing out on all the exclusive buying opportunities, fear not! At press time, we are still unpacking boxes and awaiting shipments, but we will definitely have some choice RSD titles for you to take home and/or on vacation with you this Saturday. I think all of these will fit nicely in your carry on bag.

As always, we’ll have copies of the 2016 Sub Pop RSD titles. If you didn’t know, Sub Pop will release two different split singles this year: There’s one by Low and S. Carey (a.k.a. Sean Carey, drummer for Bon Iver and solo recording artist on Jagjaguwar) where they take on unfinished versions of each other’s songs, resulting in some jammy musical alchemy. And our other split single has METZ and Mission of Burma(!!!) covering each other’s songs. You can read more about these right over here. 

But that’s not all! This year we also decided to stock some other non-Sub Pop RSD exclusives in the store. Here are a few that I recommend checking out:

-  METZ and Swami John Reis “Let it Rust” / “Caught Up”: With METZ, the singles just keep on comin’. After passing through San Diego whist on tour, they hooked up with John Reis (of Drive Like Jehu, Hot Snakes, and Rocket From the Crypt fame) and collaborated on two new songs for this gloriously noisy 7”.

- Green River 1984 Demos: These are the earliest recordings by the world’s first ever Grunge band. Jack Endino recently got a hold of the reel and was able to mix it; he says the band sounds “like a scrappy glam punk version of Mudhoney.”

- The Shaggs “Sweet Maria”/ “The Missouri Waltz”: From our good friends at Light in the Attic (can we ever get enough of them?) this 7” contains the previously unreleased song “Sweet Maria,” along with their (what bounds to be) idiosyncratic cover of the state song of Missouri.

- Ravi Shankar In Hollywood, 1971: This is a never before released recording of a private concert Ravi Shankar had in his very own home, for a small group of guests. Word has it that George Harrison was in attendance, and that this unique performance helped to inspire the largest-ever benefit shows at the Concert for Bangladesh, later that year.

- The Thermals “Hey You” / “White Rabbit”: Former Sub Pop band The Thermals just released a new LP this year, We Disappear, over on Saddle Creek Records. This 7” contains a song from that album, along with a sure-to-be-righteous cover of Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit.”

- Various Artists Doused in Mud, Soaked in Bleach: A song-for-song tribute to Nirvana’s Bleach, featuring contributions from Beach Slang, Circa Survive, The Fall of Troy, and more.

- Man Man Six Demon Bag: This year marks the 10th anniversary of Man Man’s second album, Six Demon Bag. The band, whose frontman Ryan Kattner is also in Sub Pop’s own Mister Heavenly, originally released this record as a double 10”, and it is now available as a 12” LP for the first time ever.

- Xiu Xiu Plays the Music of Twin Peaks: The title says it all. Eerie yet beautiful music, from the greatest T.V. show to ever take place in Washington state, that will dance creepily into the red room of your consciousness. 

- And many more titles to choose from!

I’d also be remiss not to mention that today, the day before Record Store Day, Sub Pop has just released the excellent Sam Beam and Jesca Hoop collaboration, Love Letter for Fire, and the airport store still has some smoke-colored vinyl Loser Editions. 

On the subject of Loser Editions, make your RSD more artful with these limited color LPs still available at the airport store:

Doldrums - The Air Conditioned Nightmare (clear vinyl)

Heron Oblivion - Heron Oblivion (white swirl vinyl - only one left in the store!)

Mass Gothic - Mass Gothic (orange vinyl)

Mike & the Melvins - Three Men and a Baby (custom dust sleeve and white vinyl - sold out everywhere else!)

So Pitted - Neo (white vinyl)

And we can’t forget colored vinyl options from Hardly Art. We still have Gazebos Die Alone (clear with yellow), Grave Babies Holographic Violence (blue and purple), Shannon and the Clams Gone by the Dawn (green and white) and Tacocat’s brand new release, Lost Time (black and blue), available on LP. 

Now, if you’ve made it this far, you might be thinking, “Hey, I’m not flying through Sea Tac airport tomorrow, and it’s totally impractical for me to buy a plane ticket on such short notice.” Don’t worry. If you visit the Sub Pop Airport Store anytime this spring, every day can be your own personal Record Store Day (while supplies last, a.k.a, until we sell-out of this stuff).