2023 Clip Show
As the year winds to a close, it’s always easy to get into that coasting mentality of “I’ll start again in January.”
I’m big on New Year’s Resolutions, and also my brain works in a way where I don’t want to just start a project at any point in a day — or on a random day. I’m very much a wait-until-Monday kinda guy, not because I’m lazy, but because that’s the rational time when you start things back up.
All of this is to say that, as the year winds to a close, I sort of puttered out on my publishing on here. I had a hard time with that mentally because, well, the world of media and journalism and online blogging and all of that is precarious as hell and I got very much in my own head of you’re not doing enough, you’re not going to get any better at this if you don’t do it, blah blah blah. At the same time, my actual job became a lot more demanding, so I forgave myself the lapses in pitching and publishing here in favor of just relaxing sometimes and not staring at my computer too much.
That said, I had what I believe is my best year creatively and professionally this year. I got to write for new outlets that I never really thought I’d get to write for. I got to do some really fun, reporting-heavy stories that I’m proud of. I found new outlets for creative energy. I got to travel a lot.
So, consider this my year-end clip show, where I compile some of my favorite things I did this year, as well as the mandatory year-end list of music I enjoyed that every music-adjacent writer (to borrow a phrase from Miranda Reinert of Endless Scroll fame) must compile.
The Stuff They Paid Me For
Without question, the thing I did this year that I’m proudest of was a story I did for Esquire about being a fan of Tottenham Hotspur. Specifically, I wrote about what it means to mostly arbitrarily pick a sports team that you have no tie to through geography or family or anything, but to have that sport and team embed itself so deeply into you that you can’t imagine a life before it. Even more specifically, I wrote about my evolving fandom leading up to and including finally going to London to see them play, all while thinking about the role the team played as something to look forward to each week while I was going through cancer treatment, even when I hated watching them.
I accompanied that with a little companion piece on here about Harry Kane, every Tottenham fan’s favorite player ever, leaving the club, and how the game I went to ended up being his final Premier League game for Tottenham.
Also at Esquire, I wrote about the phenomenon of walk-up music in Major League Baseball. You know, the song that plays when pitchers and catchers come out. It’s something I’ve always thought about, and it turns out every player’s song choices are available like court documents on the MLB website. I had been kicking around this idea of critiquing the league at large, and spotting patterns and narratives within this phenomenon. I pitched it around a bit but it never landed anywhere. I was about to write it for Substack until my dad texted me saying that he was reading something on Esquire and the tone reminded him of mine. So, I gave it one last try. I found an editor’s email, cold pitched, and it got picked up. That started a really enjoyable professional relationship with Brady Langmann over there, who was instrumental in getting my Tottenham story to where it ended up.
You can read that bad boy right here.
Speaking of music, I should probably mention some albums I liked, huh? Easily my favorite record this year was Ratboys’ “The Window.” I’ve always liked Ratboys, but this felt like a huge leap for them to another level. That title track, man. Sticks in your head for days. It’s about guitarist/vocalist Julia Steiner’s grandmother passing during COVID, and your heart’ll break while your toes tap.
Over at SPIN, I did this really fun piece about what it’s like for bands to tour in Alaska, and what the live music scene is like for the people who actually are from and live in Alaska. It was one of those stories where one interview gives way to two more from names being dropped, and I ended up learning so much through interviews with musicians like Frank Turner, Screaming Females (RIP), Portugal. The Man, and August Burns Red; and then also talking to tour managers, artists, and venue owners from Alaska about the logistics from their perspective.
I called it “Rock’s Final Frontier,” and I have Ryan Reed over there at SPIN to thank for his steady editing hand and willingness to give this story a shot!
SPIN also let me report on Taco Bell’s music choices. Taco Bell has been riding that hardcore resurgence wave, and I wanted to know who these guys were that were saying they wanted bands like Turnstile in a fast food commercial. So, not only did I talk to the guys who make the music decisions for the brand and help sculpt its youth-oriented aesthetic, I talked to bands like White Reaper and Meet Me At the Altar about being part of the Taco Bell Cinematic Universe, and whether “selling out” is something you can/should be concerned about in the Streaming Age.
Speaking of that wave of hardcore bands making music more palatable to the masses and finding success: The Armed made an album you could call the Album of the Year, but not necessarily my favorite, if that makes sense. They win the Shohei Ohtani Award for being technically the best without actually winning the main award within their sport.
It’s truly a feat of muscular music.
A new thing for me this year was getting to write an album bio for Steady Hands’ Cheap Fiction. I was honored that Sean asked me to put his album’s story to words, and I had a lot of fun writing it. I also had a lot of fun listening to the album. It was fun seeing something I wrote on Lame-O Records, which is a label is only getting better at putting out good music and seem like genuinely nice folks.
This is my favorite song off the album, which I think captures Sean’s ability to write big guitar rock while also staying true to his roots as a guy who has a tiki bar in his house.
Speaking of big guitar music from guys from New Jersey, the first pitch I landed this year to start my hot streak was over at Brooklyn Vegan, where I interviewed Greg from the Bouncing Souls about their new album, Ten Stories High. The album, created during lockdown, came from the band doing Zoom calls with fans, and they’d turn certain stories into songs that were sort of meant to be one-offs, but became a full album of, well, ten stories.
Bouncing Souls have always been one of my favorite bands since I first heard “Manthem” in Tony Hawk 4, so this was a real treat for me.
And how about that boygenius album? Really good. I ran into Julien Baker at the Nashville airport just before it came out. I didn’t say anything to her, but we did make eye contact that I hope conveyed my appreciation of her music.
The Stuff I Did For Myself
Going back over the year now, there are a few things I forgot about, and a few things I could’ve sworn I did in 2022, which means I was more productive than I originally thought, which makes me feel a little better.
I started the year by trying out a sensory deprivation tank and trying to turn my brain off. That’s never been an easy thing for me to do, so whenever something allows me to at least pause it for a few minutes, I’m grateful. That said, my relationship with the tanks fizzled out. I still wrote about the experience and Minus the Bear.
At a time earlier in this year when I was afraid I’d have to abandon my own publishing schedule two months in, I got a deus ex machina savior in the form of an email about an adult entertainment company greasing poles in Philadelphia with personal lubricant mixed with cheese, and that allowed me something fun to write about.
The Phillies lost and we didn’t even get to climb poles, which I also wrote about in a way. I got cocky and had two essays that I thought were good enough to publish together on the theme of curses: One was about how Philadelphia is cursed to suffer, and the other was somewhat of a return to my old Cancer beat, exploring the anxiety that comes with the regular tests to make sure you don’t have Cancer anymore. I’m especially proud of these two.
Every now and then I’d get kind of serious in my writing, even though my primary objective here is to entertain my friends. I wrote an essay about how people my age use meme chats to stay connected to close friends that they want to keep close, and how they do it in a nonverbal way that other generations never did. Within that same vein of aging, I also wrote about Vampire Weekend’s Modern Vampires of the City, an album that marked the age where we all needed to grow up for real. I pitched this idea to Stereogum’s Chris DeVille, who (extremely nicely) turned it down because he was writing his own retrospective on the album, and he did a really great job. He made the right call!
Sometimes I just entertained myself and my friends in sillier shit, like when I used Substack’s AI tool to “cast” a Red Hot Chili Peppers biopic. This one still makes me laugh.
Oh yeah, albums.
The Menzingers are just straight-up my favorite band. You’d be hard pressed to find a more consistent rock band since Jimmy Eat World. Menzos guitarist/vocalist Tom May told me earlier this year they were getting weird with some of their musical choices and recording out in El Paso, Texas, which is definitely a hard left for a band known for its deep PA roots. Little moments on Some Of It Was True definitely felt new to the Menzingers, like the fading percussion on “Nobody Stays,” or the grooviness of the title track. But I think my favorite song on the album is “Try.” It’s just a 10/10 really fun rock song. I also thought Tom was saying “cha cha cha cha” at first when I listened, and thought, Damn, that’s such a sick follow-up to the “Sha-la-la’s” on “Lookers.”
This is why I don’t write about music for a living!
I got to travel around a lot for work this year, and I tried to use those opportunities to create something. The first one was in Nashville where I walked around town taking pictures of all of the displaced scooters and wrote about gentrification and change. The other was out in Utah where I had just gotten my film camera and wrote about finding that spark of creativity on mountains holding old cameras. I also went to France for fun, and wrote about that as best I could. Travel writing has always appealed to me. Who doesn’t want to go all around the world and bullshit for a living? This was maybe my attempt at it.
I also returned to the roots of this newsletter by doing some good old-fashioned interviews. The first was with Walker Ryan, who is a pro skateboarder and author, and I wrote about what it’s like being a professional skateboarder and author. How writing novels informs the creative process of filming video parts, and how filming video parts informs the creative process of writing novels.
My other interview on here was with Mike from Pkew Pkew Pkew about the band’s new album, Siiick Days, which I really enjoyed. The focus of our conversation, though, was about the song “The Night John Buck Hit Three Home Runs,” which is my second-favorite song about a grandparent passing away from 2023.
Speaking of people dying. RIP Jimmy Buffett, man. I woke up to that news and reacted as if someone in my life had passed, because it felt that way. Jimmy Buffett is inextricably linked to core memories with my friends, just like he is for a billion other people. I wrote about him.
Speaking of both Lame-O records and Jimmy Buffett and also albums from this year: This Slaughter Beach, Dog album. I’ve been a fan of what Jacob Ewald has been doing pretty much since he started doing it, and each of his releases have their own distinct vibe. I also talked to him once for this very website. But all I’ll say here is that the song “Float Away” has real Buffett vibes, but maybe it’s just that he rhymes “mamacita” and “margarita.”
That should do it, huh? I’m happy with that. I’ll have more in the new year, or maybe even sooner, but I’m at least going to stick with that plan to keep publishing regularly once I have a little more time and initiative to do so.
That said, if you’re an editor for a publication and like what I do, reach out! If my schedule allows, I’m always down to pick up freelance work. And if you’re a band who wants a bio for their album, I’d love to do that again, too.
Most of all, thanks to all of you for reading my stuff. Many of you are friends who started when I made this my pandemic hobby. A lot of you are my parents’ friends who started reading this when I got sick and wanted to follow along with that whole thing. Even more of you are absolute strangers, which is wild to me – in a good way. It’s incredible that something I write resonates with people who don’t have skin in the game – the game being keeping up a relationship with me.
If you’re new here somehow, thanks to you, too. Consider subscribing today and telling a friend or two with the promise that 2024 will be entertaining.
To all of you, it truly means the world to me that you open the emails, click the links, and read even the first paragraph of this.
I’ll wrap this up with the fact that I, like so many music enjoyers, really loved that Wednesday album from this year. Big year for being named Wednesday.
Happy new year, allow yourself to be as productive or unproductive as you want, don’t look at anyone else to decide how successful you are, eat a balanced diet, drink water, come on you Spurs, go Phils. K bye.