In our new series, we look at eight cities where live music has exploded — from legendary hubs like Chicago and Nashville, to rising hot spots like Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Portland, Maine. The latest falls into the second category: the Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill “Triangle,” where college radio isn’t dead and collaboration is encouraged between artists, creating a sound you can’t find anywhere else.
Just a few months after they moved to Durham in 2013, Nick Sanborn and Amelia Meath of the electro-pop duo Sylvan Esso played their first-ever proper local show, at the Pinhook. “I thought maybe 30 friends would show up,” says Sanborn. But there were more people than that. One of the Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill area’s influential college radio stations had started playing the group’s “Hey Mami;” when Sylvan Esso took the stage, they saw a sold-out crowd of 250. “It was my first moment of ‘I can’t believe how cool this place is,’ ” Sanborn says. (Today, “Hey Mami” has been streamed nearly 30 million times, according to Alpha Data, the analytics company that powers the Rolling Stone Chart.
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