WITF Music: MDNGHT DSCO

80's sunsets and neon lights.

• Joe Ulrich/WITF
  BioRecent Stories

  

  Joe has been interested in audio and music since he was a kid. What started as a fascination with his parents’ vinyl records and cassette tapes turned into a love of both performing and recording. He grew up in Elizabethtown, Pa. and moved to Pittsburgh in 1999 where he majored in Photography at the University of Pittsburgh.
  
  In 2004, he attended the Conservatory of Recording Arts & Sciences in Tempe, AZ. He returned to Pittsburgh to work at a recording studio.
  
  In 2008, Joe arrived at WITF, where his skills have found a good home as an on-air host, audio engineer and producer of WITF Music. In 2016, Joe earned a National Edward R. Murrow award for Best Use of Sound.

Midnight Disco performs for WITF Music on Sept. 3, 2024. (Jeremy Long - WITF)

Listen to the radio feature:

If you try to search this local band, make sure you spell it right. The band is Midnight Disco, but it’s spelled without any of the I’s: MDNGHT DSCO. The band began when their lead singer moved from Maine to Pennsylvania and connected with three local musicians. They stopped by the WITF Music studio to talk about the experimentation that led to their sound and marketing one’s music through streaming playlists and social media. WITF Music’s Joe Ulrich sat down to talk to them.

Joe Ulrich: [The music] has a little bit of a throwback, an eighties sheen to it I guess you could say. How would you describe it?

Darrell Foster: I think that’s one thing that I’ve always struggled with, especially with this music is genre, themes, all that stuff. I definitely get a lot that there’s some eighties themes. Back when I was trying to figure out how to classify them, I sent that one track to a licensing company and the guy got back to me and he said, it’s great. He’s like, is the rest of the album like this? And I was like, like what? He’s like, an eighties love anthem. And I was like, I don’t know. I guess we’ll see.

Joe Ulrich: There are such different ways of promoting music compared to how it used to be back in like the nineties or even early two thousands. You’re not necessarily trying to get radio play anymore. You’re trying to find playlists, like curators to play your stuff.

Darrell Foster: I think Spotify playlist through SubmitHub is one of our best outreach things that we can do for relatively inexpensive.

How do I get my song out there to just get people to put it on these playlists? You have to pay money to get them to see it. And even TikTok, it’s like they have a list of influencers and you submit your track and then they go on TikTok and they make videos and they do stuff like that.

Michael Stipe: Shake their butt to your song.

Darrell Foster: But then again, you’re still paying for it. I think people think that TikTok and stuff like that, they think that there’s a natural reach to stuff like that. But I think that’s like you are just the luckiest of the lucky to have that happen organically. I think most times people have a lot of money and they’re paying influencers to make things go viral.

Joe Ulrich: So the two songs were Endless Skies and Love Is Waiting.

Darrell Foster: We were still trying to figure out our sound, but we had already written Love is Waiting. And we were like, I think this is the direction we want to go in. And so Endless Skies, we were thinking about like neon lights and eighties sunsets and driving some convertible car on the beach and palm trees are flying. That’s like kind of what I was visualizing while we were writing this stuff.

Everything’s great and the band’s making the best music I’ve ever made, so I’m stoked. It’s like nothing better could have happened.

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