My year in writing / living
I cannot separate 2015 from 30, the age I turned this year. All my favorite college albums are suddenly classic rock. The ’90s are in full (ironic? sincere? retromaniacal?) revival. Half the good music magazines are run by people younger than me. When I started as the Oregonian’s music critic in 2013, at 28, I felt ahead of the curve: now I’m probably behind. But somewhere between the FOMO of two dozen Longform podcast episodes, muting half the music writers in my Twitter feed and starting my third year at the office, I began to zen out on my career anxiety. The Important Debates that rage like two-day wildfires among online critics drew me to the fray less and less and eventually not at all. I set up a tweet deleter and watched years of gripes, jokes and compulsive flailing vanish.
We lost two grandparents and went to four weddings. There were ongoing family nightmares and beautiful events I’m not prepared to publicly discuss. I spent a vacation trying to untangle the knot of moderate anxiety I carried around for half the year before it mostly magically disappeared. I stayed overweight and unfit and tired. I think I need to do a meditation retreat where I just don’t look at my phone for 16 hours a day. I had miraculous $2 tacos and went swimming in the ocean for a week and saw a new “Star Wars” movie twice. Friends from California came north to see us. Oregon legalized weed. My wife and I are still, warmly, gloriously, in love.
I did spend a lot of this year on self-improvement, or training, or something: I went through web design courses on Treehouse, cleared out Lynda’s Lightroom videos, took notes on Longform episodes and spent five hours on EQ and compression tutorials so our podcast could sound better. I had epiphanies and revelations and chopped my photo editing hours in half. In the past, I was intimidated by Swiss army software or chose to learn by doing: this year, I learned by learning. It turns out I just needed patience. With that, almost anything felt easy.
And then: it was impossible not to spend most of the year reeling in terror and sadness as the police hate-crimes of 2014 spilled over into death after trending death: authorities killing black men and women, lying about it and getting away with it, over and over. We saw a just-starting election cycle that brought hatred, bigotry and dick-grabbing fear-mongering to millions of debate-watchers. We can thank Donald Trump, in a way, for bringing all the bubbling terror and anger of the Obama years to a furious boil: we know definitively now, poll by poll, what chunk of American voters are ignorant, idiotic racists.
If this was all traumatic for me, a white person, it’s a meaningless fraction of the pain felt by communities of color. I can step away from it, turn off Twitter, stop checking my phone and feel safe: they cannot. We, white America, have to look unblinkered at what’s happening and find the ways to take responsibility. I do not know where the balance is between self-care and doing the work, or entirely what my share of the work is, but I am committed to finding it. We were able to give a little money this year to the NAACP and the Organization for Black Struggle: it’s not enough, but I hope it’s something.
Against all this, I had the best and most satisfying professional year I’ve ever had. Here is some of that.
Inside the World’s Biggest ‘Magic: The Gathering’ Tournament
There were two stories I did this year that I knew I was meant to do — that were an opportunity to really step up to the plate. This is the first. I’ve been playing Magic again for the last few years after a childhood obsession and have been pleased to see the game more successful than ever. Thousands of people attended this tournament, which doubled as my friend Jacob’s Las Vegas bachelor party. So this is a Vegas whirlwind, a sports nail-biter and a geek love letter. I am so proud of it and grateful it found a good home at RS.
See you later: Heatmiser looks back at last
This is the other big one. Elliott Smith’s music changed my life. As a teen, I traced him back to Heatmiser, the 1990s Portland rock band he recorded three variously essential albums with, though he was only part of the equation: another was Neil Gust, the group’s other brilliant singer, guitarist and songwriter. In all the myriad Smith documentation since his 2003 death, no one had told the full Heatmiser story, or the story in its own right. I am honored the rest of the band gave me the chance.
New Adventures in Wi-Fi: Meet Portland’s music innovators
I spent weeks picking the subjects, sitting down the interviews, writing the profiles, taking the portraits and building the code for this trio of stories on Portlanders making their own ways in the music industry’s ongoing chaos.
Garth Brooks interview: The country icon on Nashville, GhostTunes and his Portland shows
I haven’t told this story yet: Brooks’ publicist offered me an interview with him, country’s biggest star, the guy who’s sold more albums than almost anyone, but said we had to set it up immediately. O.K., I said: have him call me at 2 p.m. Brooks called an hour earlier, I misheard his introduction and slowly realized who I was talking to: I panicked. I let the phone go silent for a few seconds and hung up. He called right back, graciously dismissed the lost connection and more graciously offered to call me at 2 when I was ready. No one is charismatic on the phone: in my years of interviewing, Stan Lee is. 50 Cent is. That’s about it. Garth Brooks absolutely is. He’s as warm as the sun. He’s even better in person.
The best headphones at any price
A heady dive into arguably the most important area of modern music listening. This was an education for me and hopefully for anyone interested in a starting point for an exhaustingly geeky corner of the tech/music world. I still need to hear some AKGs.
Carly Rae Jepsen’s ‘Emotion’ feels it all
Like other working critics, I don’t really have the time to do that imaginary best-case scenario thing where I listen to an album for months, absorb it utterly and deliver a definitive reading in a few hundred words. But I did for Carly.
Live review: Sufjan Stevens grapples with loss in gorgeous Portland return | Live review: Rush blasts through 40 glorious years in epic Portland show
The concert review is probably a dying genre, but as I don’t do many album reviews these days, it’s the heart of my work as a critic. After doing them every week over over a decade now, I think I’m about as good at them as I’m going to get. This was also my first full year shooting arena shows with Canon’s 70–200 f2.8 II, which was a real pleasure. I’m not sure how many folks out there, in any journalism field, are simultaneously full-time writers and photographers: I should probably brag about it a little more. Here, Geddy Lee!
Treefort Music Fest
A step in this year’s give-fewer-fucks process was trading SXSW, my favorite festival and industry gathering for five years straight, for an indie festival in Boise, Idaho. I was just about the only “national” press there, was interviewed by NPR, and assigned myself for a week of band portraits and sandwich coverage. Pure fun.
Sasquatch!
At a significantly larger festival, with the Oregonian’s Jamie Hale with me on writing/photo duty, we had images and reports up every night — beating our colleagues/competitors by hours or even days. It was hard to tell from our traffic if it made much difference, but I’m proud of how hard and smart we worked. And I went critically deep on my report from Day 3, which covered Lana Del Rey, St. Vincent and Jenny Lewis.
Willie Nelson’s ‘Red Headed Stranger’ at 40: Portland songwriters on his outlaw legacy
I couldn’t get an interview with Nelson during his weekend in Oregon in January, so I took another approach: talk to the local musicians who adore him, including Richmond Fontaine’s Willy Vlautin. I love this one.
On Pitchfork, race and indie rock
This piece was intended to broaden a discussion, not refute the piece that inspired it, but I knew it would be received badly by some no matter how carefully I made my arguments. I wish some of the folks named within had been open to more of a serious conversation; I also did not want it to be a partisan wedge against Pitchfork, which I know it was for many who skimmed and shared it. Being a critic means entering a dialogue, not ending it: we all have to be aware of that, if we’re any good at this gig. The blood of indie’s oft-oppressive whiteness is on many hands, but I thought it was important to recognize that the centrality of Pitchfork has had a real impact on culture, and to raise the question of how thoroughly that power has been accompanied by responsibility.
In 2016, I hereby abandon any refereeing the state of music journalism or media-critiquing its weekly echo-chamber issues. There will be masterful work, there will be out-of-touch or amateurish babble, there will be honest taste-makers and borderline-corrupt capitalist capitulation. We’ll be making Spotify playlists or we’ll be paid by the word to illuminate every flicker and shadow of cultural life. I care about this, a lot, but I just want to do good work now. What else can we do?
Against Masculinity
I gave this one, which I wrote for fun (“fun”), a purposefully blunt title. Somehow it escaped MRA pushback, or not “somehow” at all, but because these garbage Reddit cavemen only go after women from their oversized, not-compensating-for-anything Android phones. But I didn’t expect that a relatively mild tale of my straight, cis rejection of a few hallmarks of traditional masculinity would resonate so widely. It was one of my most-engaged-with articles of the year, and two editors have asked to republish it. Come on in from the patriarchal cold, fellas!
David Greenwald is a writer and photographer in Portland, Oregon. Follow him via newsletter or Twitter.
