This could be sort of more kind of like a music blog maybe.

Although I’ve loathed the idea of writing a music blog, and even had the tagline to this page be “Nothing about music, ever,” I’ve just spent the last week or so installing wordpress and working on cleaning up the code around here in order to turn this into a music blog.

Why?

In October I started a job as an editor at CMJ New Music Monthly and New Music Report. At that point, music writing stopped being a sort of fun hobby and became my career. I was a fulltime freelance writer before, but I wrote about health and dabbled in music writing. Now I’m paid to write full time, and it’s time for me to start writing about music even when I’m not working. Music writing is work, technique, craft, not art or spontaneous creativity. And like playing music, it gets better through doing the damn thing.

I’m incredibly lucky to get to write about music all day, and to have people pay me to tell other people what I think. But I’m going to use this space to write daily (or near daily!) posts in formats that CMJ just doesn’t allow. For instance, they don’t do track reviews. They don’t do reviews over 270 words. And they don’t do concert reviews. Also I’m going to use this space to let friends keep up with what I’ve been doing, and, I hope, let new people know what I’ve been doing. Finally I’m hoping that this blog does two of my favorite functions of music criticism: 1) alert readers to recordings/artists they might not of heard of and 2) give readings of recordings/artists that could make someone who has overlooked said recs/artists take another listen. Also, I hope to use the words “weiner” and “fart” on a regular basis, just like old times.