A man stands in the dairy section of the Central Market on North Lamar in Austin, inspecting the inside of a crate of Vital Farms eggs. He is white, middle-aged, Midwestern-born, a married father of two—in other words, a Wilco fan. “Fan” as in “fanatic.” He has attended fifteen concerts at thirteen venues across eight cities in four states over 25 years (and counting); listened to the band’s thirteen studio albums (plus various Jeff Tweedy solo albums and side projects) front to back countless times; read all three of Tweedy’s nonfiction books (including an autographed copy of the latest) and even thumbed through his poetry collection, a true measure of the man’s fandom; and clad his children in Wilco-branded clothing more or less since they were born.
And yet, as a familiar rasp sings over the grocery store’s PA system, the man is stumped, unable to place the song. It’s the same befuddlement he feels when trying to remember where to find the Halloumi or chipotle peppers in adobo sauce.
Something strange is happening here.
The man abandons his eggs and takes out his phone, googling the lyrics he can make out: “The wolf is on the hill / The baby’s in the briar.” Sure enough, it’s Tweedy—as in the family band the singer formed in the early 2010s. But it isn’t from the group’s only album, Sukierae. It’s from Song Reader, an album Beck put out in 2014, composed of songs he wrote but never recorded, played by other musicians (including Jason Isbell, Jack Black, and Jack White), quietly released as a promotion with eyewear brand Warby Parker.
In other words, the man is hearing the deepest of deep cuts. And not on some hipster radio station, or on an algorithmically driven streaming playlist. He is hearing it in the middle of the morning, in the dairy section of his local supermarket.
What the hell is going on? the man thinks.
The man knows music. Over the years, he has made literally hundreds of mixes for friends, girlfriends, and the occasional random stranger on the internet. First via mixtape, à la Rob Gordon from High Fidelity. Then came CD burners, followed by iTunes and streaming services, which made sharing music—with specific friends or the world at large—satisfyingly easy, yet frustratingly limitless. The man currently has 627 original playlists on his Spotify account, and he follows many, many more.
And he knows grocery stores, and retail music in general. He toiled at a Linens ’n Things in the late nineties (mostly working in the “Things” department), where he estimates he heard the Goo Goo Dolls’ “Iris” at least a thousand times without ever listening to it on purpose. He later worked nights at a Missouri grocery store during college, where he was subjected to a middle-of-the-road selection of familiar oldies, from Sam Cooke songs to “Funkytown,” night after night. Hardly a punishment, it became torturous as the hours wore on. He has spent plenty of time shopping for groceries, slowly being driven crazy by hearing pop tunes such as Nelly Furtado’s “I’m Like a Bird,” Joan Osborne’s “One of Us,” and Duncan Sheik’s “Barely Breathing” again and again.
What the man observed at Central Market was different, and it wasn’t a one-off. Over time, he and his wife developed an inside joke of sorts to mark instances of the phenomenon he first witnessed in the dairy aisle. He texts her a meme of Leonardo DiCaprio dancing whenever he hears a particularly pleasing song—Kurt Vile and John Prine’s charming take on “How Lucky,” Paul Simon’s underrated “The Obvious Child,” plenty of Khruangbin before Khruangbin was a known commodity—while picking up dried mung beans, cumin seeds, and vegan shredded cheese.
He’s noticed other examples too. Even when the store plays an iconic artist, it tends to favor cuts so deep the average person might not recognize the singer. Think Bob Dylan and Bette Midler performing an unlikely duet of “Buckets of Rain” or the occasionally overwrought U2 delivering the mellow “Tryin’ to Throw Your Arms Around the World.”
And then there are the covers, a surefire way to provide what Bruce Springsteen once described as the essential ingredients for a hit: familiar but different. The Beatles’ “I’m Looking Through You,” rendered with toughened sweetness by Steve Earle. Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ “Learning to Fly,” stripped to its vulnerable core by the Weepies. (True to the band’s name, this song made the man tear up a bit by the wild mushrooms, thinking of a family member who was hospitalized at the time.)
The man, of course, is me, and it turns out it isn’t all in my head. In Dallas, from a solar-powered coworking space (one of the nation’s first) inside a renovated Depression-era industrial building, sit the two people responsible for Central Market’s exquisite playlists, music aficionados who are not, in fact, in the employ of Central Market, at least not full-time. They’re creatives at Reveal Productions, which has worked with the grocer for much of its thirty-year existence, providing not just its music but much of its creative vision—from the words on store signs to an internal documentary about the destruction and resurrection of the North Dallas location after a 2019 tornado.
The duo, Grant Garnett and Eve Allison, are devoted music geeks who have long paid close attention to how music affects their work lives. One of Allison’s first jobs was at the nineties mall retailer Gadzooks, where headquarters would send a monthly VHS tape of music videos to play in the store. The limits of analog media meant these tapes contained fifteen or so videos that played on a loop all day long. For customers, that might not have been noticeable, but for an employee, it meant hearing the same songs roughly every hour, or eight times a shift—enough to drive anyone insane. “It was maddening,” Allison says. “There are a few songs to this day that I just can’t—I have to walk away.” Among the offenders: “She’s So High (Above Me),” by Tal Bachman, a first-ballot inductee into the Hall of Shame for cursed earworms.
Rather than gripe, Allison took action. “I discovered in the back room that there’s a box of all the previous months’ VHS tapes that went back a few years,” she says. “And so I took it upon myself to be the VJ, just cycling through tapes so we didn’t all go crazy.”
In a sense, it foreshadowed her work for Central Market. Most retail brands rely on a music service, such as Muzak, to provide in-store tunes. Independent retailers, meanwhile, might use an employee’s playlist, or one created by a streaming service’s algorithms. At Central Market, the music is handpicked track by track, which benefits both employees (who are spared the torture of repetition) and customers (who might find themselves humming along to an unfamiliar take on a familiar song or digging out Shazam to discover a new favorite artist).
“If you recognize an artist” on the PA, “it probably isn’t a song that’s on the top ten,” Allison says. “It might be a B-side or a deep cut, or maybe it’s a really good cover of a famous song of an artist you like. The whole point is, all Central Market wants to do is bring new foods to the customer, and educate, and delight them with things they’ve never seen before. And so the music should emulate that experience.”
To create a playlist, Garnett and Allison typically jot down songs and add them to a master file. They also rely on their ears when they’re out and about, taking notes on songs that might work in the stores. (Allison says she used to drive her partner crazy by googling songs the couple heard while watching movies together.) Central Market also uses music to reinforce its themed promotions, such as a recent Portuguese Passport event, which Garnett says sent him down a musical rabbit hole. He and Allison got tips from chefs who are experts in Iberian food, which in resulted in a two-week playlist that was 100 percent Portuguese music. “That was pretty extreme,” Garnett says. “But a fun and awesome challenge.”
They also hear from notable musicians who might have recommendations or even hope their music will get played. This influence is especially noticeable during the store’s Texas-themed promotions, during which Garnett and Allison aim to play music beyond, say, “Deep in the Heart of Texas” by including a wide range of genres, not just the familiar country and western swing.
Anyone who has worked in creative services knows that the work is only as good as the client lets it be. And it turns out the client—Stephen Butt, president of Central Market, which is owned by H-E-B, the beloved Texas grocer founded by his great-grandmother in 1905—shares Allison and Garnett’s enthusiasm for esoteric playlists. He’s the type of person who will not just notice a Dwight Yoakam and Sheryl Crow cover of a Sonny & Cher classic (“Baby Don’t Go”) playing in one of his stores, but excitedly text the person responsible for it on a Sunday afternoon and just as excitedly relay the story over email months later.
But even if he hadn’t already been on board, an experience in the brand’s San Antonio store might have convinced him. A shopper, unaware that she was talking with the person most responsible for the store she was in, asked Butt if he worked there. As it turned out, she wasn’t looking for active dry yeast or organic mangoes—she wanted to compliment him on the songs playing in the store and ask if he knew anything about them. A few customers over the years have sent emails expressing the same fondness for the music, which is designed to make shoppers feel better without calling attention to itself.
“Grant just has a really good ear for music, and he’s familiar with a much broader range of artists than I am,” Butt says. He adds over email, “My role is to open the door and create the opportunity for Grant, and his team, to express his personal passion for great, lesser-known music tracks from artists of all genres. Grant is a true music geek and aficionado with a great ear, for what sounds good and works in the Central Market space.”
He continues: “You can’t create a unique shopping experience in food by offering the same common brands (Coke, Pepsi, Frito, etc.) which are available in every store up and down the street. Likewise, you don’t create a unique shopping experience, where people leave feeling better without really knowing why, by playing the same music they hear in every other store they shop in, or in their dentist’s office, or at their car wash.”
The only problem? The work is never done. And without hard deadlines, such as themed weeks, the task of refreshing the playlists often gets put on the back burner. Still, Garnett and Allison occasionally find gems that motivate them to find more, even if the notes to self sit on their phones for a few months. Plus, there are biases to overcome—they’re always on the hunt for more female voices, for example. As any foodie knows, sometimes the best meal is the one you haven’t tried yet.
On a humid Thursday night in Austin, a crowd gathers inside the restaurant section of the Central Market at Westgate. The people are literally well-heeled—alligator boots abound as a group including Butt and writers Lawrence Wright, Elizabeth Crook, and Texas Monthly’s Stephen Harrigan celebrates the supermarket’s thirtieth birthday with an in-store performance by Ray Benson and Friends. (Benson also performed for the store’s tenth and twentieth anniversaries and has been something of an informal adviser on the store’s live shows.)
The night begins with the unveiling of a mural, by Will Hatch Crosby, whose mom took him to Asleep at the Wheel shows at La Zona Rosa when he was a youngster. It depicts Benson taking a nap atop a giant armadillo. After an introduction by Harrigan—who calls Central Market “the Asleep at the Wheel of grocery stores” and jokes that frequent shopper Benson has seen “aisles and aisles of Texas”—the musician appears genuinely touched by the artwork, which includes a lyric of his, about going “down to the Central Market” (though he says he doesn’t remember exactly how the song goes).
Another mural in the store, Paradise of the Violet Crown, features a who’s who of Austin musicians and venues. It was created by Kerry Awn, who was chosen in part because of his cover art for Doug Sahm’s Groover’s Paradise, which depicted the Capital City mid-seventies in the same trippy manner. (Butt hands me a pocket-size reproduction of the mural, replete with an essay by noted writer and historian Joe Nick Patoski.)
The milestone celebration emphasizes Central Market’s connection to music—not just the recorded kind, either. As Benson notes, many of the chains’ ten stores across Texas regularly feature live music on their patios, which he calls “a lifeblood” for local artists. Arlington’s Maren Morris and Houston’s Kat Edmondson are among those who got their starts performing at Central Market locations, alongside family-friendly arrays of Gypsy-jazz guitarists, Beatles cover bands, salsa artists, western swing bands, and more. (My children are hardly the only ones whose early years included dancing at the feet of a steel guitarist during a grocery run.)
It’s not just the bigwigs and creative consultants who possess a passion for music—on a recent store visit, a shopper overheard two employees discussing music while stocking the shelves of Central Market’s wellness section. “Man, I fell asleep to A Love Supreme last night,” one said, referring to John Coltrane’s spiritually inclined masterpiece. “I slept great—didn’t even get up to use the bathroom!”
So perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise that, on this Thursday night in September, as Ray Benson’s professional quartet plays Asleep at the Wheel’s ballad “Texas, Me and You,” a couple—a long-haired man in an orange plaid shirt and a bolo tie and a woman in a white dress shirt, jeans, and Chelsea boots—gamely dances, lost in song, lit by the glow of a mural, holding each other close, swaying in the middle of a grocery store as if that were the most natural thing on earth.
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