Six Degrees of 33s

Places3 articles

Studios, cities, addresses, and countries.

• The Innocents Abroad

  1,217 working bands wear the name of a place on Earth. Twelve formed in it; 1,051 provably did not; not one member of the others is from the place either. A ledger, an atlas with insets and click-through lists, and the songs — Deutschland is sung by Germans, Germany by everyone else.

• The Most Recorded Address on Earth

  Abbey Road really is number one — 27,000 recordings at one London address. But the rest of the top ten isn't studios at all. It's churches, a Suffolk barn, a suburban New Jersey living room, and Madison Square Garden.

• Where the Red Light Was

  The ledger can place only a sliver of recorded music at an address — and that sliver tells two stories. In the documented 1950s and 60s, the recording capital of Earth was one engineer's studio in New Jersey; by the 2020s no city on the planet holds even four percent of the map. A geography of the red light, and of the flashlight that looks for it.