A Miscellany of Micro Music-Journalisms, Old and New…

Friday is about music, so links and playlists. Today, a few of the recent forays into writing a wee snapshot photo-caption/paragraph/flash(non)fiction blurb about albums, memories, photos, events…

I was neither joking, nor trying to be particularly gloomy last week when I asked what shape, if any, you imagined for “Music Journalism” in 2025.

It’s gone. Largely. We know that. But also, you know already — by virtue of being here — that one of the places Music Journalism has gone to rebirth itself, to evolve, is Substack.

I mean, no less of a human and songwriter than Robyn Hitchcock just launched a Substack the other day, choosing to celebrate his hero Syd Barrett — on the occasion of what could have been Syd’s 79th birthday — as his introductory offering:

Remembering Syd Barrett

So, as I’m sure Chingy has already said, there’s some reading for ya, right thur!

I’m reading first-hand accounts from people that were there when the record industry exploded, and some that were still there so many years later when it imploded. You can still find plenty of old fashioned reviews, and there’s all sorts of things that pass for new forms of music journalism — and not just on Substack. It is out there, somewhere, in some places…

I’ve been trying a few new forms lately, sorta micro music journalism; little blasts. I’ve long felt that whatever “music journalism” was (or is) it’s as much about the personality of the writer and what’s in the writing, and that’s even more important now if anything — we can get the music for free, or sample it. We are all hearing it, or we’re able to, at the same time. So what might separate things, or help to alert people to certain things — giving something the tick over and above anything else — can come down to the way it’s talked about, the joy that is sparked, the memories that are shared.

I’ve moved back onto Facebook for a bit, and I’m liking it more than I’d probably want to admit. I’m using it more like some people use the notes function here on Substack. And I’m using it the way some people use channels like Reddit — I’m also on Reddit, and joining (in) with nerd communities to celebrate eccentric tastes and takes. It’s fun. That’s the aim. That was always the aim.

So I wanted to share some of my recent “micro journalisms” and “flash(non)fictions” with you — and try and create a few new ones to leave here. Fresh examples. It’s all just about ways to connect and share a love of music after all.

Look here ^ A memory of seeing The Clean, it wasn’t the best time I saw them, but it was my favourite — something about the energy that night. So I shared the picture, which isn’t the best picture I’ve taken, but is also somehow perfect — matching what I felt I heard that night. And I put down some words — which you can read (hopefully) in this screenshot, pinch and drag the image and blow it up to read if you can’t. And see there, right off the bat, a comment backing it up somewhat and adding another (important) view: One David Kilgour weighs in.

I was chuffed to see this — I’m just tossing a few things out on Facebook, and Reddit, and here on Substack, and sometimes Instagram, and seeing what hits. Not for the clicks, but for the chats, not for status, and absolutely for gratis.

Here’s another:

The 2012 self-titled album by Melody’s Echo Chamber really blew me away. I had a brand new baby in the house, and a lot of time to listen to music, even if I was in an early morning state of befuddlement (that would sometimes last all day, or for weeks). That little baby is now a teen. And he introduces me to music. Sometimes it’s music I heard when he was little and then forgot all about for a while (like Frank Ocean). The other day he started playing me a Tame Impala track. And it immediately made me want to listen to Melody’s Echo Chamber, and to tell my kid about it — and the connection — too. I did. And then thought it was a funny way of sharing the story in general. So I shared it more widely:

Oscar took over the car stereo the other day, as he more frequently does. He said, “I wanna play you something you might not know and I wanna know what you think of it”. And he played me a pretty decent track off a Tame Impala album, the third record I think — but I never listened to them/him much past the first album. I told him I thought it was decent, and that I respected that guy as an ideas-man and player/producer even though I didn’t listen to him all that much. I then bored him with the story, which I think I have correct, that shortly after Tame Impala first broke big, Kevin hooked up with a French singer named Melody Prochet. He played bass, drums, and some guitar all over her debut album released under the name “Melody’s Echo Chamber”. He produced it too, and I presume had a co-writing or at least arranging hand. Melody’s voice is great, the songs are good, and it’s a charming, fun psychedelic dream-pop experience which I really like to revisit from time to time. Oscar turned up the volume on the car stereo and clicked the Tame Impala track back to the start to play again since I had “ruined it” for him. Anyway, here’s that Melody’s Echo Chamber album. There were others, without Kevin Parker’s involvement, but not just because of that, I think this is best.

I like to think it both saves you time from writing the full article — and also could be the seed for more writing.

Example:

Over on Reddit I posted this shot of the final studio album by Dire Straits. I might have once called this a guilty pleasure, but why would I have done that? I feel no guilt at all — this album is (mostly) terrific. I’ve also wanted to write about it as an example where it might have made more sense to be released as the first studio album by Mark Knopfler. There are other examples — the final Talking Heads album (Naked) sounds more like David Byrne’s first post-band album than it does the Heads record that came before it. Makes sense right? But that’s a topic for another day. On Reddit I could get that ball rolling though, I shared a comment under the shot:

The final studio Dire Straits album. Sure it’s the first three (or four) that really matter — but I’ve always liked this (with the exception of one song) but I reckon it makes more sense to think of it as the first Mark Knopfler solo album, it’s closer to Goldenheart than Brothers in Arms, to my ears.

Like a prose poem, or flash fiction short story, this caption is supplying the reader with a lot of information in a short space — it’s also leaving room. There are clues. Plenty of breadcrumbs here. I’m not saying this to blow my own trumpet, just showing an idea around a new way of writing about music — this is, I believe, still music journalism. It’s really the purest aim of music journalism: To share ideas about music. Before there was a record industry, music journalism was a popularity contest, posting pictures and sharing dating stats. And chart numbers. After the birth of Rolling Stone and a few others, music journalism became about taste, and about the writing; about music — absolutely — but it was also about the personalities and (writing) style of the people penning the articles. It was also about being totally in cahoots with the record companies and advertisers.

We’re post record sales now. So we can just share ideas, and tips and tricks, and picks. It’s fun.

I adore this new album by Jeff Parker — I’m a huge fan of his playing and ideas (and bands) across most of the last two to three decades. So I shared this album-length YouTube clip on Facebook with some thoughts. Straight away I get comments from people taking it in a new direction — someone seemed baffled that this album was by a guitarist because they couldn’t easily identify the guitar. Someone else heard different things to what I heard. Isn’t this great though? Right. This exchange of ideas is not new, this was exciting about comments on blogs 20 years ago, and was still passionate and fun on social media ten years ago. But something changed. We all became knowitalls, or checked out completely and didn’t want to know anything. I’ve liked sharing immediate, unedited thoughts on platforms about music recently. So here’s what I said about this Parker album. It’s not a review, but then again, in a way, it is. It’s a recommendation, a trailer, a teaser:

The new Jeff Parker album is sublime — he’s been one of my favourite guitarists across the last couple of decades. People might know him from Tortoise’s early work of course, but over the last decade he’s made a handful of amazing, intricate, deep solo recordings — always with a stellar band. This live outing is brilliant and features one of my all-time favourite and most musical of drummers, the great Jay Bellerose. If you don’t know him by name, search your record collection — if you’ve got a half pie decent set of albums in your house you’ll have heard him. He’s there on albums by Rhiannon Giddens, Joe Henry, Willie Nelson, Rosanne Cash, Robert Plant and Alison Krauss, Rickie Lee Jones, Bonnie Raitt, Sam Phillips, Over The Rhine, Aimee Mann, Patty Griffin, Mose Allison, and many — many — more. Anyway, this (double) album is a live improv across four side-length tunes, and it’s subtly glorious. Shades of The Necks, Miles Davis, Coltrane, and more. Just divine really’

This is more music-nerd-y, lots of chat about the drummer, who is one of my favourites. So it’s about what I’m hearing, my taste — which is all I’m qualified to write about — and all I’ve ever really done. But it’s nice to be spreading it across different media and platforms, and in different ways.

Here’s one that’s not “Music Journalism” at all:

Back when I regularly used to speak to people for a weekly podcast — artists, writers, musicians, actors, etc — the chance to talk to Mike Nock in his Sydney home one grey/ish day back in 2016 was one of the absolute highlights. I have been listening to Mike Nock’s music forever — or it feels like it. And it’s a constant source of happiness, and inspiration. Also, I can never forget one of Katy’s very best lines. I asked her if she wanted to go to a gig with me one time when he was playing Wellington. And she was in a take it or leave it mode, or as she said, “I mike…or I mike nock!”

It’s a silly little story about a pun — which also happens to be fantastic. But that’s a punchline at the end of a sweet little memory about talking to a legend.

But share the clip that inspired this memory, as I did on my Facebook page, and you’ve got a new little snippet of music journalism. This is a way of getting people to click the clip and see if they like it too:

On Sunday I was watching the cricket, there was a drink’s break and I jumped over to YouTube and played this Mike Nock track — because I love it. This long song feels like an album in and of itself, even though it’s EP length at best. There’s something deep and soulful and majestic about it, as there is with so much of Nock’s music. And that in turn got me remembering that I’ve met Mike. I’ve recorded a killer conversation with him where he remembers sharing the bill with Miles Davis and chatting with Keith Jarrett, and mingling with Chick Corea, and others. I was there in his house hearing these stories. And as I was listening I was able to think back to when I first saw Mike Nock play, and how in that moment I knew that I wanted to know him on some level, to speak with him, to find out about him. There, so many years later, I was achieving that. And now here, nearly a decade on, from time to time something triggers that nostalgia valve, and I think about it as rear view mirror stuff. It’s kinda cool, and just fun to share.

Sometimes I am going to take that sort of thinking, and listening, and write it out like an old-fashioned column:

But sometimes it can be fun to just do a little micro thing, a wee blurb, some unfiltered thoughts. Let’s try one off the cuff now, of course by the time you read this it will not be off the cuff, I’ll have read it back and decided where each comma goes, and what the mood was and whether I think that worked. But you’ll have to trust me, I’m about to just improv a wee blurb thing and see if I can make a recommendation or find something that resonates for me, in the hope that it will trigger something that resonates in you.

Here we go then:

Most biographies of Lou Reed will tell you that Mistrial is weak, mired in 80s production, and on one song he attempts to rap. They’ll tell you that it was muddled, and that Reed was at the end of the road, ideas-wise, before the rebirth that was 1989’s New York. What they won’t tell you, it that my mum bought the album the day she found it in a Hawke’s Bay music store, because she was committed to buying an album a week to improve the standard of music in her house. And she knew Lou Reed from Walk On The Wild Side, and other things. And loved him. She took that album home and played it to her 10 year old son, and he hadn’t ever heard anything like it. Years later, he’d pick the tune Outside to play at school, to read out the lyrics, to show the class — the teacher would keep him back and ask him if his mother knew that he was listening to music like that. He would get to say that he hoped so since his mother had introduced him to the album, recommended the song, and told him it would mean more than most of the mindless pop music others in the class would choose. And the biographies of Lou Reed will definitely not tell you that the kid grew up to almost have a career in music writing. And now bores people on Substack. Anyway, try the album!

Okay, um, I’m not sure that worked. How about this:

Anita O’Day didn’t know she was being filmed for Jazz On A Summer’s Day. Have you seen that fucking film? It’s everything. And then right in the middle of everything Anita O’Day shuffle-saunters to the stage. She has this hat. And gloves. The dress. And so much sass. She was high as a motherfucking kite. And she sings one of the greatest versions of one of the greatest songs. Sweet Georgia Brown. And she’s on the junk, and unaware of the cameras and it goes down in history, goes down as history. She was just trying to make it through the set. And yet, I’m supposed to say that some flavor of whatever month is good just because they have a lot of ‘likes’ on Facebook, followers on Twitter and some towering – and unrealistic – version of the latest kind of self-belief. This is the fucking problem. “All you can do – is learn to be a good loser” you know who said that? You can guess I’m sure, because it’s obvious where this is all going. Anita O’Day said that. Everything she said counted. Whether it was for the record — or not.

And finally:

A couple of years ago I spent a great day in Melbourne walking around with a mate, visiting record stores. I had enough money (it was my birthday, I’d been given some cash) to treat myself to a few records. I was buying movie soundtracks almost exclusively at the time. In one of the stores we got talking to the guy behind the counter about his soundtrack section — he recommended this album Se Ci Fosse La Luce Sarrebbe Bellissimo by Blak Saagan. He told us it was not a soundtrack to a film, instead it was a concept album about the bizarre true story of the 1978 kidnapping of the former prime minister of Italy. Blak Saagan makes a version of what used to be called ‘library music’, those generic cues that are fodder for samples now but were once the soundtrack music for hire to a heap of documentaries and installations. I was sold instantly on this concept — not sold in the sense that I bought the album from him. (I’d blown my allocation). But sold, because I went straight home and remembered that above and beyond every conversation and recommendation that day. I had a dozen new records and all I wanted to do was hear more of the music I’d been teased on by one clip. (The one above, but you guessed that already). I bought the album on Bandcamp immediately, so I could have it in some capacity, not to hold, but to hear. And of course I regretted not buying the vinyl. But I still have the music in some way — and I still trot it out and hear it. And what’s more whenever I post about it in any way at all someone also tells me they checked it out, thanks me for a new name, and/or tells me they forked out for the physical product. I get nothing from that, in terms of a kickback, but I sure get a kick out of it. Which is all I’ve ever wanted.

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So, there you go. Some micro music journalisms. Feel free to share some of your own below.

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And to finish off, as always, a wee playlist. I really like this one. And my hope is you’ll like this too. Or at least something from it: