Scottsdale young people The Summer Set have built up a big, devoted fanbase for their particular brand of electronic pop-rock, but it was still a bit of a surprise to see where that had gotten them Thursday morning--on NBC at the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, performing for a New York crowd that didn't have to get up as painfully early on their day off to see them as their fans in Arizona would have.
After a lot of hand-wringing about wind speeds--which I guess are an issue when you're floating giant balloons down a busy city street filled with children--the parade went on as scheduled after a last-minute reprieve.
That gave the band a chance to perform "Lightning in a Bottle," their new single, which blessedly does not posit the anachronistic pairing of James Dean and Audrey Hepburn like "Boomerang," which ran out of qualified Beyonce-Jay Z comparisons a few lines too early. (I get it, George Peppard doesn't fit into the meter.) While they were at it they got in some quality time with the minions from Despicable Me.
We don't write about The Summer Set a lot here because--well, mostly because I find their combination of debauched parental-advisory sex-boasting and Radio Disney choruses genuinely unnerving. But they're as close as any Valley band has been in a long time to actual, bona fide stardom, which is kind of interesting even if the band doesn't do it for you; the "Boomerang" video has just shy of two million hits, and their every move on Facebook merits a few thousand Likes from an international audience.
They've put in the work, too--they've been touring and recording basically from the moment they've been a band. (We first wrote about them in 2009, when they were touring on Love Like This, their first full-length.
Since then they've released Everything's Fine and 2013's Legendary, their first album on Fearless Records. And who am I to say you won't like "Boomerang," even though they posit an Audrey Hepburn movie that doesn't exist?
This isn't their first connection with Macy's; earlier this year they were part of the Macy's iHeartRadio Rising Star Contest, which they ended up winning. (When the final comes down to fan voting they have a pretty formidable fanbase to draw upon.)
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