Pinning down the buzzing, cross-pollinating music scene of this here Live Music Capital is like trying to catch a cloud and pin it down, or trying to hold a moonbeam in your hand. Austin’s Music Scene: Your Guide to the City’s Most Iconic Artists & Venues does it anyway via good ol’ fashioned blurbs, crafted through interviews and research thoughtfully compiled by Editor-in-Chief Mitch Baranowski’s fledgling team and accompanied by pictures assembled by the Chronicle’s own David Brendan Hall. Half of the book’s proceeds benefit HAAM; its glossy pages hit the shelves in October to coincide with the essential organization’s 20th birthday.
“This isn’t a history book. Nor is it a work of music criticism,” Baranowski, lead writer and Thunderhouse founder, clarifies in the tome’s opening pages. Rather, he introduces Austin’s Music Scene as a celebration, one as kaleidoscopic as possible, while accepting that music scenes, already difficult-to-define entities, are neither neatly divided nor reliably stable. Yet our desire to document and preserve is perhaps our defining trait as a human species, and the inevitability of becoming outdated has never stopped us before.
This 224-page attempt begins with a history of PBS’s Austin City Limits, told through an interview with executive producer Terry Lickona, then bursts through the gates into a furious race of colorful characters, beer-stained venues, and festivals of all sizes, crossing the finish line with a toast to our Red-Headed Stranger, Willie Nelson. The up-to-the-second snapshot is punctuated by historical context pages, memorializing passed-on legends that shaped the scene we see today: Doug Sahm, MC Overlord, Flaco Jiménez, and Armadillo World Headquarters, to name a few.
Genre-divided sections honor the guitar aficionados and beatmaking experts of Austin’s wily styles. Baranowski describes our unique concoction of blues as “a restless, genre-bending creature that refuses to be contained by tradition,” which might as well describe every so-called genre in this city, as the artists featured within quickly attest. With remarkable deftness, Baranowski dips into the meaty broth of each complicated segment, doing more than skimming the surface and capping off each section with a list of additional musicians to explore when you’re done brushing up on the bands that can’t be missed.
This guide is not just a welcome coffee table adornment in Austin’s many Airbnbs, but an important almanac for those of us living in its pages.
I came to this field guide as a skeptic, for all the aforementioned reasons. Also, I happen to know that this book came together in 10 months, and I happen to believe that no book worth reading comes together in less than two years (I’m super fun at parties). Admittedly, though, releasing the project during HAAM’s double-decade celebration has a cool ring to it, and on an initial read-through, I found myself uttering corny lines of astonishment aloud. “They’ve got BRUCE in here?” I asked the air around my desk rhetorically, amazed to see a listing for Carrie Fussell’s new project, which debuted a mere three months before the book’s October publication.
Did you know that the Continental Club used to be a burlesque bar, or that Elephant Room was christened in reference to real mastodon bones discovered during a street excavation next door? I may be young, but these were new fun facts to me. There are exceptions to every rule, and this guide is one.
The beautiful trouble with music scenes, often lovingly depicted in oral histories, is that who you know and how you found them shapes your view of what’s around you, and your own bustling bubble likely shares a fragile, pearlescent wall with other bubbles you’re not even aware of. The encyclopedic field guide approach pops those delicate barriers, placing acts that may have never shared a bill side-by-side on the page.
Tucked in these pages are also resources for further learning (the Chronicle included) and for supporting and sustaining local music in the city, making this guide not just a welcome coffee table adornment in Austin’s many Airbnbs, but an important almanac for those of us living in its pages. My copy of Austin’s Music Scene is already stained and dog-eared, its binding stretched unforgivingly, as a good reference book should be.
Austin’s Music Scene: Your Guide to the City’s Most Iconic Artists & Venues
Edited by Mitch Baranowski
Thunderhouse Media Group
This article appears in December 26 • 2025.