“This Weekend Today,” WBHM’s new calendar of events in partnership with Bhmstr

We’re introducing a new series on WBHM: “This Weekend Today.” It will feature a deep dive into the Magic City’s entertainment scene for the upcoming weekend and beyond. Each week, Sam George, creative director at Bhmstr, will join WBHM’s Richard Banks to fill us in on what’s happening. The segment will air each Thursday morning and afternoon.

This interview was edited for length and clarity.

Sam, before we talk about the segment itself, tell us a little bit about yourself.

I’ve been covering events and doing event-related things in Birmingham for a long time. I started with music blogging when I first moved here, and then, when I became the editor-in-chief of Birmingham Weekly, I became heavily involved in making the calendars for that paper and deciding what events we were going to cover in the paper. And when I left that and the Weekly shut down, along with many of the other alt-weekly newspapers in town, I felt that resource, the calendar resource, was something that disappeared along with those papers. And I have dedicated basically the last decade of my life to reproducing those in some kind of a digital form.

So each week for this segment, you and I will discuss the goings-on here in Birmingham. What are you looking forward to covering generally, even specifically?

I really believe … that seeing the broad picture of events available to go to is a really important part of understanding the community that you live in, knowing what people are interested in doing, what the opportunities are. And so I want to cover events from a pretty broad spectrum of genres and styles.

What do you see as the strengths of the Birmingham entertainment scene and what would you like to see improve, for lack of a better word?

Things are really good. There is, I think, a lack of hip hop shows to go see, especially local hip hop that’s coming up out of Birmingham. There’s stuff coming in regionally and nationally, but homegrown artists, hip hop artists, don’t get to have as much exposure, I think, as the rock-and-roll or country, blues, Americana artists that we’re producing. But that said, there is a lot of interesting stuff happening at some of the newer venues. Woodlawn Theatre out in Woodlawn has been doing a lot of interesting bookings there and highlighting some things that wouldn’t normally get highlighted otherwise. The new sort of resurgence of Workplay, since they got taken over by new owners, has sort of reinvigorated that venue, and there’s some interesting local acts that are being highlighted there as well.

Sam, tell us a little bit about the relationship WBHM now has with Bhmstr and the calendar pages.

Yeah, we’re going to provide WBHM with a calendar of featured listings. They are going to be the events that I highlight in my weekly “Next Week Today” column, and then the full listings will be available at Bhmstr, that’s bhmstr.com. So, if you want to know what’s happening today, tomorrow, this week, you can head to WBHM. But, if you want to see a longer view, plan out a little farther, come over to Bhmstr and we’ve got you covered there.

Bhmstr’s featured calendar listings will be available each week at WBHM.org/calendar.