Letter From The Editor

In recent years, it seems that a lot of people have been denigrating the local music scene. It wasn’t as good as it used to be, they’d say — and for a long time, I agreed with them.

After that early-to-mid-2000s period when there was a good band playing a lively show all the time, it seemed, for a while, that things had hit a lull. (Maybe, partly, it was just all of us being collectively nostalgic for our own teenage days.) But these days, I really don’t think that argument holds up anymore. In the past, say, two or three years, there have been some really, truly amazingly talented local acts coming out of Honolulu.

This week, staff writer Jaimie Kim gives us a look into one of them: Streetlight Cadence. This four-person band started out playing the streets of Waikiki, worked their way up to gigging pretty much everywhere in town (seriously, if you’ve been to any event in the past year or so, you’ve probably seen them), and now, they’re on their way to California to try to make it big. Read more about Streetlight Cadence and their impending move here.

In other exciting local music news, Roger Bong interviews singer-songwriter Erin Smith, whose been setting radio records with her single Love Long Distance from her latest album American Boy. You can read more about Erin and what’s next for her here.

As Anton Glamb points out in his column (here), things are always going to be changing. Yes, the music scene — or nightlife, as he discusses — may morph over time. But that simply means there are opportunities for something new.