Are you a music fan?
If so, you’re definitely in the right place.
New Music + Old Music is a newsletter about just that: new music and old music. It features new LP reviews, frequent posts on great new songs, obsessively-curated playlist streams, recurring old music reveries, heads up on concerts and ticket sales, plus book and film reviews, video content and other easter-egg hyperlinks.
What kind of music? The good stuff — all kinds.
Indie rock, classic rock + assorted hyphenate-rocks that, y’know, rock.
Soul, r&b, and hip hop that isn’t boilerplate.
Folk (-rock) and country (-rock) that feels fresh or vividly classic.
Jazz and jazz-adjacent music that’s not boring, hidebound or schmaltzy.
Club music, techno, house, jungle, and “electronica” that works outside the club.
Ambient. Classical and composed music from various traditions.
Pop and roots styles from everywhere: Bossa nova and afrobeats, reggae and reggaeton, Latin pop and Irish trad.
(And especially) Music with zhuzh that doesn’t fit neatly into categories.
I’m going for music to brighten your days, colorize your nights, and visa-versa. Music to make you say “damn, that’s good.” Sure, it’s all subjective. But I’m guessing if you’ve read this far, we’ll find plenty of common ground and shared obsessions.
Why should you subscribe on a paid tier?
to access streaming playlists (in multiple platforms whenever possible)
to access most longer posts
to access the archives (over a year’s worth of prime stuff to discover)
to support my independent journalism
I post weekly, often more than once, with regular bonus posts including the Song of the Day and Weekend Links series.
How deep are the streaming playlists? See the ones I compiled for my biography Lou Reed: The King of New York — 12 of ‘em, one for each chapter, featuring nearly every song I mention in the book and then some. There’s also one for Love Goes To Buildings On Fire — 300+ songs, sequenced in the order they appear in the book.
I stream my Substack playlists on Apple, YouTube Music, and Spotify. But there’s no pay-for-play bullshit here, and no AI — the curation is human.
I’ve been writing about music and culture for a very long time — for Rolling Stone, The New York Times, Pitchfork, Uncut (UK). You may hear me on NPR’s Morning Edition and All Things Considered. Back in the day I wrote for SPIN, the Village Voice, Minneapolis’ City Pages, Option, and other places. I also write books, among them the aforementioned Love Goes To Buildings On Fire: Five Years in New York That Changed Music Forever, and more recently, Lou Reed: The King of New York. (Yep: I’m a New Yorker.)
Thanks for considering a paid subscription. A great deal of work goes into this, and paid subscribers make it possible.
This can be a digital version of the gab-about-music record store spaces some of us hung out at back in the day. Drop some comments on me and let me know what you’d like to see more of. We can build our own algorithm.
Expect to be turned on to the unfamiliar, dig deep into the familiar, and savor artifacts that, to paraphrase Prince, will help us get through this thing called life. My initial inspiration for this newsletter was Patti Smith, who also inspired Love Goes To Buildings On Fire (a story I’ll share in a future post). In her Substack intro, she wrote “I am still here.” Me and you, too. Let’s have some fun.
— Will
(Me in Grand Central Station, probably on my way to a concert)
