A Little Corner #3

An Interview With Josh Terry

Josh Terry is a freelance writer based in Chicago. He's worked for VICE, RedEye Chicago, and Netflix. His writing has appeared in countless publications like Rolling Stone, Billboard, Dwell, and Chicago. He currently runs the weekly music and culture newsletter No Expectations.

 VB: What’s an album or artist that makes you excited to be a music journalist or a freelance writer?

JT: I did an interview where I got this question and I mentioned Greg Freeman’s I Looked Out. I feel like I've been mentioning him every week in No Expectations. (laughs) He makes this kinda Jason Molina, twangy, expansive broody “countrygaze” which is a genre that I guess is a real thing.

There's a lot there, a lot of really great records that make me excited to do it. You know, when I started writing about music, I knew my writing style wasn't necessarily really academic, but I knew that the way I wanted to write was to be as if you're just sitting on a couch with your friend talking about what you're listening to. I wanted it to be conversational and inviting and accessible. Simple, clear, but passion-filled language. So whenever there's a record like Greg's, you're excited to be able to sing the praises of that album. I feel like every year in my career I've had an artist where it hits me in such a way where I just literally can't shut up about it. Greg is definitely this year. Last year with the band Good Looks and then the year before that, probably Katy Kirby, who's an amazing songwriter, Mamalarky or Nnamdi, maybe in 2020. When I hear a great record, the gears kind of start turning where I'm just like, “Oh, I can't wait to explain why I think this is really cool.” 

There's just there's just so much if you're not excited about it, you shouldn't be writing about it, you know? 

VB: Something that comes across very well in any of your writing is the kind of passion that you have for this world. I think it’s something that is very much needed in getting new people engaged with music in that way is to just have the kind of passion behind it!

JT: Yeah, that's very nice of you to say. And I totally agree. You know, when you do this kind of work for a long time, you start to, get to know some of the people that you write about and you get to hear from them about their own communities. It doesn't necessarily have to be Chicago, It's just that excitement of being “Hey, they're cool.” I live in Chicago and I love this music community here, and there are so many amazing artists that I like, even if they're not making music now, I remember how influential and fun and important they were to the scene at the time. So to be able to, get to meet people who are excited about their local communities and be able to glimpse into that world is really cool. We're all here because we love music. It's just sometimes the industry or the economic factors can really mar that excitement. And I think at the end of the day, it's just really important to remember why we're doing this and being in music communities and being in creative fields in the first place. 

VB: Does it make you excited for how the industry is moving forward and how people are kind of working around the limitations of the “industry?”

JT: I think the quality of the writing and the quality of what people have been able to do under these economic circumstances is really cool. I am excited about the industry at large? No.

The avenues to make a career out of it are really, really drying up. You can rise to the top and be super lucky and make decent money doing it if you get one of the few remaining staff jobs. But the amount the industry has dwindled since I started over ten years ago is absurd. And when I started it was the worst time to get into music journalism. You know, I can we can spend the rest of this interview talking about publications or blogs or paying magazines that no longer exist that existed when I started. The people who are staff, they’re overworked and they're doing two jobs because their companies didn't fill those positions. I have ten years of experience and I started my own thing. It was to just write about the things that I like writing about, you know? But if you're just starting out, the way you're probably going to be able to hone your craft is doing it yourself. 

Writing is great and people should do it. But I'm upset at the fact that they're really Isn’t that a place for young writers to be edited to have the infrastructure to do all different kinds of music journalism. You know, when I started, I was working for a website that had me do news blogs where you'd have to turn something in a half hour tops. Album reviews, show reviews, on-camera interviews, all those sorts of things. 

It sucks that, people who are passionate and have the talent aren't going to have the infrastructure and the guidance from other journalists and editors to hone their voice and make it a sustainable career. 

VB: Are you happy then, for a place like or places like Substack where you can kind of take the initiative and get your own stuff out there? 

JT: Totally. I mean, I'm grateful to have a place where I could just write my thoughts and for at least a fraction of my subscribers, get paid for them. That's really cool.

I sort of started it to just do the kind of writing that I haven't really had a paid opportunity to do. You know, I cover pretty niche music scenes, local communities, and when you're pitching a magazine, they’re looking more at how many Instagram followers do these artists have? Will they share the story? Will we get good clicks? Is this like an act that other people are already talking about? And I'm, I'm not really interested in that in most cases, you know? (laughs) So being able to give these artists a small platform and to just explain why I really dig what they're doing is a cool thing. I avoided doing something like this for years, but I'm grateful I did, even though I was a little late in starting the blog.

VB: Well, I, for one, like, as a reader, I very much appreciate the huge breadth of things that I've been introduced to through No Expectations and Taste Profile.

JT: With the Taste Profile, it's really fun because people like talking about what they're into, you know? When I'm interviewing musicians, they're typically talking about the record that they're promoting. So it's a good change of pace for them to just talk about stuff that was formative to them then, and what they're into now. That's the best way to get to know someone. It’s to say, “what are you into?” And when someone's into something that's kind of when their most, unguarded self comes out. They're just saying, “Hey, I love this and I think you'll love it too!” Music is definitely my number one passion, but over the years, I've developed a pretty pretty big interest in film, sports, literature, all those sorts of things.

I don't really just write about music. I got a little self-conscious about writing about other things. There are a couple blogs that are about NASCAR or movies or tech criticism stuff about AI and the state of the industry. I had to say, “People signed up not for one specific reason. They're not just signing up to be like, ‘Hey, I'll just listen to the playlist.’ or ‘I'll just see what bands check out this week, or what shows go to.” I realized that people aren't going go if I write about something that isn't this specific subset of indie rock in Chicago that I write about all the time. If I write about something that I'm just interested in people are gonna stick around. And that gives you a lot of freedom to be think, “I'm not feeling the traditional album blurb and here's what's been on my mind, or here's this controversy that's happening in the music industry, and here's this kind of interesting take I may have about it. 

VB: I think there definitely is a freedom in writing for yourself and for an audience at the same time. I wanted to pivot and ask you a little bit about some of the formative things in your life. Are there albums you go back to?  

JT: When I look back at, like, puberty age, like I was always into music, but there kind of something clicked in me where I was like, I need to discover things. And like, there's like a switch that turned that made music sort of like my defining personality as I was entering my teenage years and trying to figure out who I was. So like a big one was definitely Radiohead, you know? I was kind of a Nu Metal kid a little bit when I was really young, I was into heavier stuff. 

After school I'd just go to the iTunes store page, you know, and just click on the thirty second snippets of the related artist. They also had these playlists where this celebrity made a playlist for the iTunes store, and if it was a celebrity I liked, I would either buy it if I had money or try to LimeWire it. (laughs)

There’s a record store in Grand Rapids, Michigan where I'm from, called Vertigo Music that I went to quite a bit. It took me a while to become a vinyl guy. I would just peruse the CD section. I was in high school and it was my senior and junior year from  2007 to 2008. And I think there was just like a lot of great music coming out around that time. Obviously you had In Rainbows by Radiohead, but you also had the first Bon Iver record, and Merriweather Post Pavilion. You had the first Fleet Foxes EP and album, and It's corny, but I was also into Coldplay! I feel like that's a formative band for a lot of people. I think before you couldn't really develop a critical sense of taste. You probably watch Garden State, if you're my age. (laughs) And then I was really into this band called The Frames, that period of time I was just trying to listen to as much as possible. I got my hands on the Spin Record Guide and was trying to go through that to fill in blind spots of albums that came out. I wasn't alive in the seventies, eighties and early early nineties. I obviously like Nirvana and stuff, but I was two when a lot of those records came out. (laughs)

I would just discover stuff. And college. I got a little more comfortable in my taste. When I started writing about it, I kind of began to interrogate my tastes a little bit and venture out of my comfort zone, discover new genres and think about why I liked the things that I liked and why I didn't like the things I didn't like, and investigate why and research about the things that I don't like in order to see if there is a way for me to like them. Doing that made me like a lot of music I know it's the most cliché thing to say that you listen to all music, but there really isn't a genre that I can't figure out a way to like, get into somehow, you know?

VB: Is there anything in particular that kind of spurred that on? Starting to interrogate your own tastes? 

JT: Oh, I think it was because I was given an opportunity to write about music. My first gig, I was an intern at the AV club. I had been reading the AV Club for a long time and I knew that their critics had pretty omnivorous tastes. But it was eye-opening for me because I realized that even though I had spent so much time looking up bands and discovering new records and old records too, that there's still so much that I didn't know. It made me realize that I need to kind of branch out besides this specific aesthetic and genre sensibilities that I've cultivated in my teen years, you know? 

So that kind of realization made me want to get better. And in order to get better, you gotta expand your horizons. You gotta read as much as possible. You have to introduce yourself to new things, and you also have to write, you know, you have to, um, know that you don't know, but be willing to learn and adapt and to tweak your voice whatever way possible. And like, through listening and reading as much as you possibly can, you kind of develop a critical sensibility rather than just, rather than just being like, “Hey, this sounds great. Radiohead's a cool band.” 

VB: Oh, there was one other question I had, it was about that conversational tone that you like to have with your writing. Where did that come from?

JT: When I was in high school or maybe early college, I remember watching No Reservations, the Anthony Bourdain show. I remember him saying something along the lines of, “I write like how I talk.” I'm not saying how I write is how I talk, but I'm trying to get that as close as possible. Obviously I do a lot of, “you knows” and “likes" and “uhs" in actual conversation, but I'm trying to think about the way that writing can feel engaging and accessible. That's sort of just a stylistic choice, but the way that I think about the newsletter, what I'm listening to or what I wanna write about that really just comes from friends.

When you immerse yourself in a music community, bands that you'll have that you’ve never heard of come up. Those conversations happen, even if you're not in a physical space. My joke is that Instagram is the best music discovery app because if you have friends who are into it, you'll just go to their Instagram stories and listen to the songs that they post. And that's it, it's not the algorithm!

I think the social life aspect of just being at shows and going out and talking to friends who are other writers or musicians or  just fans who go to shows is important. I think it's just seeing these people out and about and kind of doing the whole thing of, “See any good shows lately?” small talk. (laughs)  With my writing, if someone has a problem at their job, it's a venue or if someone's going through it in terms of this band drama sometimes it makes sense to write about it in a journalistic capacity and sometimes it doesn't, you know? But I think more importantly, there's this constant balance of honing your craft, doing the work writing, but you're not gonna be really good at it if you don't nurture the other parts of your brain that need social interaction, that need fun, that need a little bit of adventure, that need to get out of the guest bedroom where you do all your writing. So it's all about striking that balance. And also in between balancing social and work lives, you have to just like, take a couple days to do nothing.