Denton's Pageantry Find Out What the Fuss is About at the CMJ Music Marathon

Lesley Keller

Pageantry playing in Manhattan during CMJ in October

At the end of October, Denton's Pageantry traveled to New York City for the annual CMJ Music Marathon. We invited singer and guitarist Roy Robertson to reflect on the band's experience there -- their first time attending the convention -- and its potential value to Texas musicians.

We applied to CMJ earlier this year through their online submission form but hadn't really planned on getting in. We thought we might have a chance since we'd done SXSW back in March but we still weren't sure how much clout that would bring to our application. We went ahead and had almost finished booking a West Coast tour for the end of October when the invitation came to play in August. Doing the festival meant we'd have to reschedule our tour and fly up north instead of tour; it was so close to the festival's start date that finding enough shows there and back would be tricky.

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Even still, there wasn't much discussion on whether to do it. We all thought it would be good for the band to get the festival under our belt and it seemed like a good excuse to go to New York City and play a bunch of Frankenstein bills for people who had never heard of us before.

You see, CMJ is a huge music festival. More than 1,400 bands play in over 80 venues during the weeklong fest. Bands like Grizzly Bear, Sufjan Stevens, M.I.A., Vampire Weekend, the National, TV on the Radio -- they all played there at some point before they'd broken big. Unlike Coachella or Austin City Limits, CMJ is more like SXSW in that, for lack of a better phrase, it's an industry festival with a couple of huge artists playing big stages but most of the lineup consists of smaller, independent acts.

Pageantry on Tumblr

Pageantry arrive at La Guardia in New York City

Pageantry on Tumblr

The band checks out the daytime city skyline

That latter category of smaller acts is definitely where Pageantry fits in. We've been a band for about two-and-a-half years and usually tell people it's like dream pop but with odd stuff mixed in. Ramon Muzquiz plays drums, Pablo Burrull plays bass and I sing and play guitar. From the onset we knew we wanted to get out of Denton and tour as much as we could. In the beginning that meant weekend trips to Austin, Houston, San Antonio and the like. but in the past year we've done multiple tours of the Midwest, Southwest and West coast and had our first official SXSW showcase earlier this year. We've had a few releases so far, including the EP Friends of the Year.

Things didn't start off the smoothest, at least not for me. We landed at LaGuardia on Monday night and I had already broken my sunglasses and forgot the only guitar I had brought from Texas on the sidewalk at the airport before we had even gotten on the bus to the city. But thn we crossed a bridge on our way to where we were staying and got our first glimpse of the Manhattan skyline. The Empire State Building was glowing in the distance alongside the thousands of other high-rises; we were in New York City.

Day one we got our artist badges and went to a couple industry panels being held at NYU by Washington Square that were advertised as an opportunity to meet and learn from people in the "industry." Some of the speakers were definitely people we wanted to meet: Managers, record labels, publicists, etc. But there was also the vice-something of ReverbNation and I wanted to ask him if he knew of any band that actually uses the site. (Fun fact: Pageantry is currently No. 8 on the local charts.)

There was an interesting mixture of people in the audience and I kept trying to distance myself from some of them, especially the guy in front of me who kept introducing himself to everyone with his name and the amount of plays/likes his music has on YouTube. Jesus. Predictably the panelists got the fuck out of the post-panel "networking room" as soon as they could to escape the crowd of admirers trying to impress them. I made a few attempts to "network" myself, but the vibe of the room and pretense of making important connections was too much to handle. Plus, I kept hearing a voice in my head saying, "Free stuff... at... the artist lounge."