Dopapod Get Ready To Send 2015 Out In Style With NYE Bash

By Mark Zurlo

With the Allston Pudding New Year’s Eve extravaganza taking a year off in 2015, your live music options in Boston on 12/31 are a bit limited this year. Hallelujah the Hills are at Great Scott, and John Brown’s Body is at Sinclair, but what if neither of those strike your fancy? Well, if you’re at all into jam bands and willing to broaden your geographic horizons a bit, you’ll find a barn burner out in Worcester that might just be the perfect way to ring in 2016.

The quickly rising stars (and Berklee grads) in Dopapod will be putting an exclamation point on what has been a banner year by playing a headlining show at the Worcester Palladium with buds Turkuaz and Kung Fu. With all three acts expecting to play side by side throughout the night, you can expect the show to carry on well into the early hours of the new year.

Before looking forward to the party that is sure to send 2015 out in style, we asked Dopapod keyboardist Eli Winderman to look back on the year that has been for the band and list their biggest moments. Here’s what he had to say:

2015 was an amazing year for Dopapod. We had some amazing highlights like playing for 10K people at Bonnaroo, opening for String Cheese Incident at Red Rocks Amphitheater. We also toured the entire country and did our first ever west coast run in the summer. This year felt like years of hard work coming to fruition.

Bonnaroo- We originally played Bonnaroo in 2011, but not on an official stage. We went in ‘renegade’ style and set up our gear in the camping area where we played 3 sets a day all weekend. Little did we know we’d be on an official stage playing for 10K people 4 years later. It was an incredible experience. The massive crowd was literally chanting our name before we even hit the stage. It was the loudest applause I have ever heard while being on stage. The crowd was with us for the ride too. In all of the breakdowns of songs they would start clapping to the beat. I’ll never forget that experience and hope to get there again someday.

Red Rocks- Red Rocks is a venue that is hard to sum up in words. It’s been a life goal of ours for a long time to eventually play there. It’s an unbelievable sight to look up at thousands of people surrounded by gigantic rocks sticking out of the earth. It sounds amazing there. Even just sound checking in the empty amphitheater and hearing the echoes off the rocks is something I’ll never forget.

Next year we are planning on taking the first 3 months off to write all new music. So, I suppose our resolution is to write a lot of new music! That and I want to do a lot of charity and volunteer work.

Tickets to Dopapod’s “The Ball Drop” show at the Palladium are on sale now