Signing Off + Heading To WASH Mag

Y’all, I hate writing these. I never feel like I can adequately cover all the things I want to say. But it’s gotta be done, so here goes.

After almost four years of C O N T E N T, I’m sadly closing the Tape Deck for good. No more interviews; no more covering albums in colors and colorful verbiage; no more longform pieces that run just a touch too long; no more podcast episodes featuring my sniveling, nasally vocal tone (it’s all kidding, don’t worry). As my attention keeps being pulled away to other projects, it’s getting too expensive for me to keep the domain running.

I’ll still be doing all of the above things, except maybe the podcast, at a new website I just started with my wonderful colleague Alicia Long. It’s called WASH, and it’s called that because unlike The Tape Deck it’s a site totally devoted to local music. I’ll link it here, and I advise anybody whose reading this to follow me there, because that’s where I’ll be. In the meantime, I’ll keep the site up for another year, over which I’ll be archiving a lot of the local stuff I’ve written here to WASH so it doesn’t get lost to time.

When it began, I had worries about adding too much of myself in my writing, so please allow me to talk about myself for a second.

I started this tiny blog in February of 2019, back when the world was a different place and I was a different human being – younger, hungrier, more innocent, certainly more insecure. My band Arbor Towers had just dissolved following my drummer’s relocation and a disastrous recording process, and mentally I needed to break away from the habit of putting so much weight on my musical output. The thing with creative people is that you need to create to function properly, and so I decided to take up music criticism as a creative outlet while I took that break. I didn’t know how to write about music, and I didn’t know how to code in CSS (only one of those things is still true today). 

Mentally, I have a tendency with all my creative projects to make a clean split right after they’ve been sent out to the world. I think it’s a coping mechanism of some sort. The funny thing, though, is when I look back at any given piece I’ve written, I can almost always recall where I wrote them in vivid detail. The first article I wrote for the site was a collection of short album reviews I intended to put out every week – some of these records, like the first sunking LP (whose “Saffron” I used to use as the intro to the podcast) remain in my list of favorites to this day. I wrote that piece at Espresso Vivace on the day we got all that snow, remember? I lived in a house in Capitol Hill, on 12th somewhere between Harrison and Republican, my first spot in the city proper. That day the streets were never quieter. Street traffic had ceased completely; the plows took hours to reach our neighborhood. I carefully navigated the tall mounds of untouched snow to the coffee shop, somehow still open in spite the weather, Jessica Pratt’s Quiet Signs piped into my ears all the while. I nursed a cappuccino and spilled ink on whatever came to mind, which at the time was the new Ariana Grande record and that one solo release by Panda Bear. (When I met him years later and told him I genuinely enjoyed it, he replied “Great! Not many others did.”).

Since then, I’ve experienced burnout for sure, but that mystifying feeling – of trying to capture sound in words, of weaving an argument out of scant resources – has never left me. I feel it every time, in some capacity, when I sit down to write. I felt it at the long table of Empire Espresso when I conjured my first – and, at the same time, last – truly negative musings on Florida Georgia Line and Weezer. I felt it in the chilly lobby of Caffe Zingaro, an establishment I’m eternally grateful for in giving me (and my boyfriend at the time) a place to briefly escape quarantine. I felt in the old Broadcast on S Jackson and the blinding white countertops of Sugar Bakery; I felt it in the dark confines of the Clock-Out Lounge and the Tractor Tavern; I felt it staying in hotels and motels and overpriced AirBnBs, in the homes of friends and acquaintances, in an apartment that over a year and a half nearly suffocated me in my own anxiety as I waited out the pandemic. I’m feeling it right now as I write this at a table in the Cap Hill Caffe Vita, bristling under darkening sides as my stomach grumbles.

It’s been an incredible journey, mostly for myself, because having a relatively low-stakes outlet to practice putting together arguments and expressing my passion for music has helped me immeasurably. It’s turned me into someone more confident but also more receptive to shifts in perspectives, which in turn has broadened my capacity for empathy. I’ve always had trouble relating to people, and I still do, but I’m no longer as afraid to give an opinion or to put myself on the stage as I used to be. Maybe one day I’ll get better at social media, but I’m still secretly hoping for the day when we collectively realize how awful it’s making us feel and give it up entirely.

There’s a bunch of people I wanna express my gratitude for before I cap things off. If you’re someone whose music has been covered on this site – especially if this site was one of the only sites to have covered your music – you kind of have Rigo Hernandez to thank for that. He’s the guy who patiently listened to me spin manic yarns about music history and pushed for me over and over to create an outlet of my own. I’ll always be grateful to my parents and my brother, and to John Michael Hunt, still a beacon of support despite everything. To all the people who supported me doing that short-lived Patreon, I truly appreciate every single one of you. That goes the same to the myriad coworkers and bosses, all the musicians and writers I’ve met, the people who agreed to be on my podcast, and the legions of random Internet strangers who gave me unsolicited comments, both positive and negative, for this ridiculous rating system I invented. (Even that one guy who sent me that death threat, you’re getting lumped in here somewhere because when you get your first death threat on the Internet you know you’re doing something right. You should get some help, though.)

Finally, I really want to thank every single person who had the courage to express themselves musically, because without you I wouldn’t have anything to write about! It comes down to this: whatever you put to record is a gift, something that’s part of yourself, even if what comes out is incomplete or hastily recorded or even repellent to the untrained ear. In an era where so many of us are relinquishing our lives over to AI and algorithms, you counter it by taking something as inimitable as your own human experience and making art out of it. No matter what, that’s always worth validating. So I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it time and time again – thank you for your music.

Okay, I’m hungry, so I’m gonna go get some poke. See you at WASH.

Rob