City of the week :

This week’s City Spotlight shines on Phoenix, Arizona, where journeys have crossed paths for centuries. Long before highways connected the American Southwest, the Hohokam people transformed the Sonoran Desert by carving more than 135 miles of irrigation canals across the Salt River Valley, allowing life to flourish where few thought it could. Later, when settlers established a new farming community in 1867, the city was given the name Phoenix, a symbol of new beginnings rising from what past civilizations left behind.

Growth has always been part of Phoenix’s story. The arrival of the railroad connected the young city to the rest of the country before the completion of the Roosevelt Dam secured the water that allowed it to expand. After the Second World War, military bases, new industries, and the adoption of good old-fashioned air conditioning transformed Phoenix into one of America’s fastest-growing cities. Now the fifth-most-populous city in the United States, what began as a small desert settlement steadily became a modern metropolitan center where people, ideas, and opportunities continually found one another.

It’s only fitting that a city built at the crossroads of so many journeys would develop a music scene just as diverse. Phoenix helped launch artists like Alice Cooper and Stevie Nicks before giving rise to influential bands including JFA, The Meat Puppets, Flotsam and Jetsam, The Gin Blossoms, Jimmy Eat World, and Chester Bennington’s early musical roots before moving to L.A. and forming Linkin Park. During the 1990s, nearby Tempe became known as a possible successor to Seattle’s alternative explosion, while Phoenix continued building a rock scene that welcomed punk, hardcore, metal, emo, and indie music alike.

Today, that tradition continues across venues like The Van Buren, Celebrity Theatre, Valley Bar, Talking Stick Resort Amphitheatre, and the historic Nile Theater, while festivals including Innings Festival, M3F, Tempe Noise Takeover, UFEST, AZ Rockabilly Bash, and Reggae Rise Up Arizona continue drawing artists and audiences from every direction. Bands heading east, bands heading west, and countless musicians chasing the next opportunity have all found themselves crossing paths in Phoenix along the way.

While artists continue passing through Phoenix, a band born in the city is now heading in the opposite direction. My Upside Down, built within the city’s close-knit alternative scene, is beginning to carry the city’s sound outward. The crossroads that brought so many journeys together are now helping send one of Phoenix’s own stories into the wider world. That crossroads is what makes Phoenix — a city worth spotlighting — and always worth watching.