So yeah, I'm writing a music Substack

Lemme explain ...

Heya,

I’m a journalist who writes about music in Rolling Stone, The New York Times, Pitchfork, and the great UK magazine Uncut. Back in the day, I wrote for SPIN, the Village Voice, Minneapolis’ City Pages, and Option. I sometimes talk about music on NPR’s Morning Edition and All Things Considered.

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.

Yeah, I’m a New Yorker.

But as music writing about the things I love most gets harder to find in the mainstream, I figured it was time to build a Substack newsletter for likeminded music fanatics with wide-ranging tastes: a roundup of essential new music reviews, and old music reveries, with obsessively-curated playlist streams to illuminate the writing. How obsessive? See my 12 chapter playlists for Lou Reed: The King of New York, streaming on Apple and Spotify, with near every song mentioned in the book + then some. 650+ songs. 50+ hours of music. Or check out some of my other playlists in my Substack archive.

 

The newsletter is called New Music + Old Music. It will generally post every Friday, and on occasion more frequently. Along with reviews and playlists, you’ll get heads-ups on forthcoming LPs, singles, books, films, vinyl drops, tours, and ticket sales. There’ll be archival deep dives and historical writing loaded with cool relevant hyperlinks, lovingly-mined videos embeds, and other data-gems, including links to great stuff by fellow music writers.

Free subscribers get regular emails, so you’ll always know what I’m up to. Paid subscribers get full posts and all my streaming playlists (in Spotify, Apple Music, and YouTube music whenever possible), plus full access to the archives. I’d like to develop some interactive elements, too; this is a community, as app developers like to say, and it can be collaborative; we can build our own damn algorithm.

Thanks for considering a paid subscription. Paid subscribers make this possible. Expect to be turned on to the unfamiliar, go deep on the familiar, and savor artifacts that, to paraphrase Prince, will help us get through this thing called life.

Patti Smith was my initial inspiration for this newsletter (she 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 too, and you too. Let’s have some fun.  (Below: me, in Grand Central Station, moments before a New York City cop barked “move it along, buddy.”) 

x Will

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