Are you a devoted music fan?
If so, you’re in the right place.
New Music + Old Music is a newsletter about brand new music, and news about music you already love. It features new LP reviews. Near-daily alerts on great new songs. Obsessively-curated playlist streams. Occasional old music reveries. Early heads up on concert ticket sales. Plus cool video content and other easter-egg hyperlinks.
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: 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.)
It’s always been a hustle. But as old media withers, new media gets shadier, and music writing on the stuff I love gets harder to find a home for, I knew it was time to build a Substack newsletter for kindred, obsessive, forward-facing music fans.
What kind of music? Pretty much all kinds. Indie & “classic” rock. Jazz and jazz-adjacent sounds. Brazilian music. R&B. Ambient stuff. Country. Dance music. African music and Afrobeats. Hip hop. Salsa. Reggaeton. Classical and composed music from various traditions. International music of all sorts. And especially music that doesn’t fit neatly into categories.
Music, and writing about music, that will improve your day. That will make you say “damn, that’s good.” Music that you will want to hear again, and again. I’m only interested in good stuff here. Sure, it’s subjective. But I’m guessing if you’ve read this far, we’ll find plenty of common ground and shared obsessions.
How obsessive, you ask? See my 12 chapter playlists for my biography Lou Reed: The King of New York, streaming on Apple and Spotify, featuring near every song mentioned in the book + then some.
This newsletter will generally post every Friday, with semi-regular bonus posts (including the grab-bag Weekend Links and Song of the Day series).
Free subscribers get periodic emails, so you’ll know what’s going on here. Paid subscribers get all my writing, paywalled playlist streams (on multiple streaming platforms), full access to the archives, plus chats. I imagine this as a digital version of the gab-about-music record store spaces I 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.
Thanks for considering a paid subscription. A great deal of work goes into this, and paid subscribers make it possible. 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 my first book, 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 too, and you too. Let’s have fun.
— Will
(Me in Grand Central Station, before a New York City cop shooed me along.)
