Hey Utah, get off of Spotify and back into local SLC radio.
Small Lake City
By Bill Frost @bill_frost
The car I drive is nearly 20 years old, which irritates the dealership I bought it from to no end. I get this email all the time:
"Hello, Bill! Do you want to trade in your 2006 vehicle that's completely paid off, runs perfectly well, and has your radio presets just as you want them for a newer, more expensive model with a payment schedule that will outlive you? Call us now!"
The radio presets part is important, as I have a specific station rotation.
While I do occasionally listen to podcasts on drives, thanks to a Bluetooth cassette adapter (America's last great tech innovation), local radio is my car jam.
The rotation goes like this:
KRCL 90.9 is usually the starting point, because it's a reliably solid source for new and older music that a Spotify algorithm can't touch. Since it's a community radio station, you don't often hear a predictable batch of songs (unless it's Spoon, a band I'm pretty sure has a secret ownership stake in KRCL) that will trigger a preset jump. But, whenever KRCL plays the Grateful Dead, it's off to ...
KUAA 99.9—Salt Lake City's other music-centric community radio station—has only been around since 2015. Not to minimize with the word "other"—how many cities have one cool station like this, let alone two? KUAA's programming is a Wild West of sound, ricocheting through genres (and languages) with an abandon you rarely hear on terrestrial radio anymore. But, when KUAA plays the Grateful Dead in Spanish, I hit the preset for ...
X96 (96.3), a Utah staple since the '90s, is known as an "alternative" (whatever that means anymore) radio station and, more famously, the home of the long-running Radio From Hell morning show. Full disclosure: I've been a small part of X96 since 1998 as a resident RFH TV critic (Mondays at 8 a.m.—plug achieved). I'm only on 15 minutes a week, but a strange amount of people think I actually work there. Nope. My intolerance of 311 physically precludes me from it.
KBER 101.1 and 103.1 The Wave are next to one another on the preset row, and they share some similarities. If I'm in the mood for Nirvana with an AC/DC chaser, it's KBER; if I'm feeling Nirvana sandwiched between Howard Jones and Jesus Jones (no relation), it's The Wave.
UtahMusicRadio.com isn't an over-the-air radio station, so that Bluetooth cassette adapter comes in handy here. UMR streams strictly Utah-based indie music artists of all genres, live and on-demand, 24/7/365, and has been at it for 16 years now. You can't listen with an antenna, but "radio" doesn't get more local than UtahMusicRadio.com.
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