An 8 & 1/2 Hour Country Music Experience — #trynuCo

My First DayBeat — The DJ Set for Your Day

At the beginning of 2023, after enjoying the creation of birthday party DJ sets, I decided I wanted to focus on DJ’ing as a hobby. In conversation, I would field questions about where I wanted to play. I could and still cannot say. But what I knew was that I consumed my music or podcasts at work or when I was traveling. I wanted to make mixes for that purpose.

But from that realization, I needed a genre-specific direction. I needed to choose a term my listeners could grasp instantly. While I have worked with Disco, there is no shortage of content in that space and it gears more to a night out than the Excel work that pays my bills.

For that direction, I looked to the baked-in advantages I had as a result of my background. I grew up in rural-ish Minnesota. When I was six at the state fair, Molly — from Molly and the Heymakers — welcomed me up on stage to dance. It was such fun I have never forgotten it. This pointed me to country music. I cannot say I — a gay man living in the city — had yet an appreciation. But as I discussed my idea, I found that was the norm. People I spoke with absolutely discriminated against country music. It was too same-same and lacked topical complication to be worth my time they said.

The DJ community seemed to agree. There just aren’t many examples of fully-mixed country music that I could find. The music market, for some reason, had doomed the genre to a full-song-play lifestyle. While this listening style bears merit, my mix contains one distinct advantage. It takes 30% more time to listen to each individual song as opposed to in my mix.

But back to my preparation. I spent time researching country music from around the world. Germany-based Truck Stop’s song Hillbilly Country Lilly is a great example of what Americans can miss. As I continued work, I reasoned that the mix did not need to be genre-specific, but also word and context-specific. Nelly’s Country Grammar was in! But then too, what made up country life? Outkast’s The Rooster was in following the discovery of a delicious sample from Brett Eldredge’s Something I’m Good At.

This said, my DayBeats are not spontaneously generated. The draft excerpts I posted…