I’ve been writing music reviews for almost 20 years now, and it’s been a wild ride. The blogosphere of the ‘00s and early ‘10s had this oddly outsized impact on the indie music landscape. Sure, tastemakers in college radio, music magazines, and record stores could drive sales and build fan bases, but they didn’t have such intense power or influence. The hype cycle for hip bands rose higher, dipped lower, and moved onto the next trend with breathtaking swiftness.

Extremely positive and scathingly negative reviews made and broke bands at the literal speed of the internet.

Sure, Creem and Rolling Stone in the ‘70s could change the course of an artist’s life, but that could take weeks and months, depending upon when an impressionable teenager read an issue. And yes, MTV held the music industry in thrall during the ‘80s and ‘90s, though not all bands had music videos, even when Kurt Loder and Matt Pinfield gave alternative, indie, and college rock acts some attention on occasion. But the Pitchfork of the ‘00s made moves that shifted movements in a couple of days, as entire continents of hipsters could read a review the instant it was published.

So, while the question I got asked most as a young blogger was, “How do you get all of that free music?,” a close second was the question, “How do you decide what to write about?” Which is valid, even though I never held any hope that my personal blog would ever attain that sort of influence. In my most optimistic days, my dream was to get found by Pitchfork, Stereogum, or Consequence of Sound on the off chance that one of their cooler writers randomly read one of my reviews on Twitter. Hence, just like a striving young band, if I wanted to attract the attention of those powerful outlets, I had to follow their lead.

And that meant chasing trends.

I definitely didn’t want to admit that in the moment, but I can laugh about it now. I can also recognize that I probably doing the right thing for a blog of my size. As any artist will tell you, it is more than OK to copy your influences when you first start creating. How will you ever learn how to get better unless you learn from people who are better than you? If athletes can openly have role models they can follow for their career trajectories, why can’t artists? So, while I would have been ashamed to talk about being a stylistic copycat in 2008, I wholeheartedly recommend the practice in 2026 – at least until you develop your own voice and personality.

But I rarely wrote mean reviews. Not only was that not my style in everyday life, but it also didn’t interest me. I didn’t understand the appeal of listening to music that you fundamentally did not enjoy and then writing 500+ words about why that album wasn’t good, especially using harmful language. It felt like a waste of my time. I was and remain much more interested in providing constructive criticism and delivering specific feedback within an overall positive writeup. From my perspective, if you write a mean review of a young band, you’re typically punching down and actively hurting their development. And if you write a mean review of an established band, you’re typically clout chasing, hoping to attract some attention for yourself.

Also, I was kind of scared to do it. The one time I wrote anything really negative about a band, it was for a scenester magazine in Houston. I was assigned the album by the editor, and I didn’t feel I could turn down the work. So, I wrote about how the band was ‘90s grunge adjacent and that their political lyrics didn’t seem to elevate the music. Lo and behold, a writer for a more popular Houston magazine saw my review, contacted the band for some quotes about my review, and proceeded to both lambast my ill-formed opinions and the owners of the publication. The only thing that stopped him from being even more critical about my work? The publishers (people I’d never met) sued that other magazine for defamation because of the mean things that writer said about the owners and the cover story interviewees of that issue.

Long story short, I knew who the big bands were, and I knew who the up-and-coming bands were. I tracked the styles, the formats, the fashions. If I could find a way to request a review copy of a top act, I did, and if I couldn’t, I would find a lesser act who sounded like that more important group and write about their new album instead. And if I was really lucky, I would get actually assigned a popular group on the occasion that a publication bigger than mine would hire me for a freelance piece. That was my modus operandi for the first phase of my writing career. From 2006 to 2013, I wrote about what I thought was cool and what might get me more attention.

Things changed in 2015.

I took a couple years off when I got a full-time day job with a consistent paycheck and benefit. I couldn’t keep up my former writing pace as an indie blogger while working 40 hours a week, being a good husband, and having other hobbies. Honestly, the time away was good for me. I read more and more widely. I deepened and widened my musical tastes. I got to enjoy music as a fan, not a writer. Instead of worrying about what cool new band was making waves, I could listen to old favorites and discover older music I had missed earlier in life.

But after a couple years away, I started missing the regular practice of writing for myself, not just for the day job. Not long after my kid came into the world, I reached out to Bearded Gentlemen Music and asked them about becoming a regular contributor. The editors liked my style and started assigning me albums. After years of stressing out about which bands I needed to cover to help raise the profile of my own blog, I could sit back and simply do the work handed to me. My only responsibility was to write a good review, which meant providing the necessary support for my opinions about the music. Whether it was good or bad, I needed to state my case. And I enjoyed it.

I also started work on a memoir about my life exploring music. The project started as a series called “Explaining Grownup Music to Kids” for Houston Press, wherein I wrote about different eras of music as if I was talking about them to my new child. When it was canceled after a year, I decided to morph those essays into something more personal, something that explored how I discovered music and how music had been my constant companion through some really significant events in my life. By the end of 2019, I had a sprawling first draft that stretched well over 100,000 words, and I thought maybe other people might want to read it.

Things changed again in 2020.

Upon finishing that first draft, I realized it might look good on my pitches to agents and publishers if I had more than one music outlet on my resume. That’s when I started writing for Treble Zine and began the next stage of my music writing. If Phase Two was spent looking inward and being chill as I sporadically reviewed albums for BGM while carving out my memoir, Phase Three found me wanting more of my career as a writer, not just an experienced content marketing professional who occasionally wrote about music on the side.

But it was also the year of COVID, which meant that I spent a couple of years absolutely terrified of my family getting sick and dying. So, while my brain obsessed about public health, my creative spirit began recharging and refreshing itself. I started the long process of editing and rewriting my memoir, which mean times of deep reflection about my past. It was one thing to talk about the albums I liked during different stages of life, but it was something entirely different to dig into my feelings about what happened in my life and why certain music from certain artists mattered far more than others.

That introspection directly impacted how I wrote about music.

As my editors would hopefully tell you, I actively waged war against nostalgia. My new goal was to openly discuss memories as a way of providing context for my opinions while rejecting any semblance of rose-colored glasses. That proved to be harder than I realized because it meant facing my fears about crucial topics that I preferred to keep locked up. To face those situations meant addressing some memories with a grownup perspective and making decisions about what I wanted to do with those stories and people.

Therapy helped. Talking with my wife did, too. Reconnecting with my brother Andrew worked wonders. Spending time with my other two brothers as grownups proved essential. By coming to grips with who I am as a person and who I wanted to be, especially as a partner and parent, provided necessary resolution and forward motion. Which meant that my creativity received a fresh injection of hope and purpose.

Writing became fun again – at least most of the time.

I love a good to-do list. Always have and always will. Having a clear outline of what needs to happen keeps me on-take and focused, whether at work, at home, or for my creative work. But I also regularly fight the impulse turning my assignments into mere checkmarks for each week. If I tell myself to get something done by a certain time, it becomes a chore, and that directly damages the quality of the work.

Eventually, I flipped the script. Instead of telling myself, “This must be done by this date,” my mantra became: “Spend time every day writing for yourself because you like it.” I realized that, by setting aside a specific time to be creative, I was honoring my creativity. I wasn’t telling myself, “You must write.” I told myself, “You can write.” This small but significant inversion in my outlook freed me to think about the music I reviewed with more openness and compassion, for myself and the artist I wrote about.

Which brings me back to the music and how I write about it.

I first approach it from a position of how it makes me feel. When have I heard this before? Where? What happened? Is this new music elevating my experience of those familiar sounds, or does it send me into nostalgia quicksand? I jot down notes about what I hear on the surface and describe those sounds in relation to my context. From there, I dig into how the artist or band made those sounds, as the “whats” of creation can directly influence the “whys” and “hows.”

If relevant, I dive into the lyrics, because sometimes they provide enhanced background into the artist’s creative intentions, but usually it’s because a given word or phrase really helped me connect with the art. Much like reading books, I don’t necessarily worry about authorial intent. I want a songwriter to draft lyrics that are meaningful to them, but I also know that listeners will take the lessons, motifs, and ideas from those lyrics that matter to them. That’s how art works (or at least should work) in general: People create for themselves and share that work without any expectations of reception, and when the people who interact with that work bring themselves to the experience, they find their own meaning (or meanings).

Thus, I want my music reviews to reflect that understanding. Art is supremely and sublimely objective. Art education should never be about teaching people what’s good and bad. It should be about educating people on processes, history, movements, and perspective so that they can develop their own tastes while viewing art through their personal lenses.

I love music. I always have, and I always will.

Watching my 5^th grade kid discover music on their own is such fun. Sure, I’ve put plenty of my own musical preferences in their ears during their young life, but I do my best to resist judging their musical tastes like my parents did to me. And watching their musical discovery helps me approach how I listen to new music, even if it’s from an artist I’ve enjoyed for years.

For me, writing about music is about the intersection of what I’m hearing now, what I’ve heard before, what brought the artist to the place where they created this art, and what brought me to the place where I’m experiencing this art. It’s about intentionality, craft, and respect for the artisan and the medium. It’s why negative reviews still don’t interest me, but careful criticism means more than ever. I want to surround myself with artists, writers, and appreciators who are invested in both ensuring that music endures and finding fresh ways to explore what music can do.

Creating music matters, and so does writing about it.