At the end of last year, I made a mental note heading into 2024 to check in with how I was feeling about writing a music site once the first quarter wrapped up. Being overwhelmed by new music, feeling burnt out with trying to maintain a site keeping pace with it all, wondering if any of this work is adding anything of value to both my life and a landscape where media is dying, streaming giants and large live music corporations are the only ones profiting off art, and to be perfectly honest — fewer people outside of music writers themselves seem to care about written reviews — have all become growing concerns.

Yesterday alone, five albums of deserved attention dropped between new releases by Adrianne Lenker, Waxahatchee, Jlin, Spaced, and Julia Holter. There might be more than that. I just haven’t had the bandwidth to take a deeper dive, which is awful to admit because it’s usually artists with less exposure who stand the greatest risk of seeing their work overlooked. A wealth of great music isn’t something to take for granted, but we’ve normalized the habit of forcing listeners and critics alike to binge new music each Friday before moving onto next week’s heavy slate. As a writer who wants to write about all of the albums that will likely be considered for the site’s year-end list, the thought of spending the next few weeks coming home after a long workday and logging back on to my laptop to write a few hundred words about an album every large professional publication has likely already articulated to the masses to a greater degree has begun to feel kind of pointless.

Which leads to the monotony of it all. My time as a music writer began as a Great Recession-era hobby during a spell of unemployment well over a decade ago. Three site iterations later, I’ve written a few thousand posts made up of album reviews, track write-ups, lists, artist profiles, and interviews. Part of me is realizing that perhaps I’ve been unwilling to admit how I’ve been merely going through the motions of writing for the sake of writing. When a passion hobby becomes something more of a daily life distraction, you have to question if you’re still finding any joy in it.

Whatever joy you still do have as a music writer, there’s a good chance the social media aspect of it will whittle that away, too. It’s been my least favorite part about doing this entirely, yet it’s a necessary evil. I don’t see it getting better, especially as sites like Twitter/X become less safe and the echo chambers become smaller. We’ve moved into a phase with it where its purpose is less to discuss and share in our collective enthusiasm over music discovery, but rather competitively turn it into discourse, a justification to drag some stranger online, and cultivate a really unhealthy atmosphere where being — point blank, an asshole who has the right connections — is rewarded with protective influence. I’ve not bitten my tongue hard enough at times and have owned up to my own missteps along the way, but it’s becoming much too unnecessarily a stressful byproduct of dealing with this.

There’s also trying to politically navigate music personality beefs, an increasing amount of questionable hearsay sliding into my DMs, and the omnipresent threat of when an artist you’ve praised ends up doing something entirely reprehensible. All of this causes you to become extra cautious about who you are giving a platform to. This is well above my pay grade (which amounts to about -$200.00 annually once you figure in a WordPress subscription and various domain renewal fees…) and when you add in the hours spent perpetually trying to catch up with your writing, reading and responding to e-mails from publicists daily, and chasing down interviews going on four months unanswered, you realize what once was a rewarding creative outlet has now become an endless negative loop you feel stuck inside of.

This is my long-winded way of saying that I need a break from music writing in the manner I participate in it now. Not just one of those breaks where I take a few weeks off and come back reenergized, only to get burnt out in a month’s time all over again, but a genuine break where I can divorce myself from this corner of the world and attempt to reclaim joy in music and writing in the same way I used to experience it. I’ve connected with some amazing, supportive people along the way in the form of artists, labels, publicists, fellow writers, photographers, and readers, and while it can be daunting to see what happens once you step away from something that has long been part of your daily routine and identity, this feels like the healthiest thing to do at this point in time. The only person who can define the value of my body of work in the music writing world is myself, and I’m very proud of what I’ve accomplished. The door will always be open to return.

Thank you for everything.

—

+rcmndedlisten