For the past three years, whenever I’ve written a music feature for The New York Times, I’ve received texts and emails with different versions of the same sentiment: “Since when are you a music writer?”
I understand the confusion. For the last 15 years, I have been reporting on the technology industry in the San Francisco Bay Area. Most of my days are spent poking around the designs of Silicon Valley, like Mark Zuckerberg’s plans to build a virtual world in the metaverse, or Sam Altman’s quest to create a robotic demigod. So I usually shrug and say that sometimes I dabble in arts writing.
And when I wrote an article on Deftones’ new album release for The Times’s Culture desk last week, the questions from friends and colleagues came rolling in again. This time, however, I told them something a bit different: I’ve been a music writer for about 20 years — just not a very prolific one.
Let me explain. In 2005, I landed my first gig in journalism as a freelancer for Performer Magazine, a regional music publication aimed at promoting up-and-coming artists.
I had gotten the music bug earlier, after getting my first electric guitar at around 16 — a 1999 Fender Big Apple Stratocaster, with crunchier humbucker pickups instead of the brighter single-coil magnets typical of the model. I remember seeing Metallica play at Texas Stadium in Irving on the Summer Sanitarium tour in 2000 and again with Deftones in 2003, two of my earliest concert memories from high school.
Aside from the terrible, short-lived bands I started with friends, I never really aspired to be more than a bedroom musician. But I knew I had a knack for writing, and doing early album reviews and band interviews was a way to combine my love of music with the one thing I was actually good at. And a working knowledge of gear helped me relate to some of the musicians I interviewed because I could speak their language.
That first freelance gig at Performer eventually led me to an internship at Paste Magazine in Decatur, Ga., a suburb of Atlanta with a thriving music scene. In between writing news items on PJ Harvey and Drive-By Truckers, I was assigned record reviews on big-name artists, including a solo album by Black Francis of Pixies. I couldn’t believe I was actually getting paid to do something I loved.
Life threw me a curveball. After finishing that internship and eventually graduating from college in 2010 — three years later than I wanted to and directly into the financial crisis — I found that music writing gigs were drying up. The rise of the internet was decimating the print industry, so I was lucky to find an internship back in San Francisco at Forbes writing about technology. I had no experience in the field, but when you need a job, you find out how to learn quickly.
My timing was fortunate. Forbes had no one to regularly cover Facebook and Twitter, then two promising start-ups that had yet to go public. I had stumbled into a career chronicling one of the most powerful industries of our time during the rise of the consumer internet and the dawn of the smartphone.
The beat was fascinating. While I had missed the heady days of the dot-com, boom-and-bust era of Silicon Valley, I was there to document the era of the internet then called Web 2.0. Unlike the dial-up modem days of my youth, the iPhone put the mobile internet into all of our pockets. And after using those smartphones to snap photos on the go, everyone got the ability to zhuzh them up with artsy filters on Instagram before posting them into the digital ether.
And it all played out as companies competed for dominance across the battlefield of American capitalism. I was riveted.
Still, I never lost my love of music writing, even though most of my old clips are lost to time and to the reality of print publications going away. It’s why, about three years ago, I started bugging Caryn Ganz, The Times’s pop music editor, who indulged me in my love of metal and punk bands and welcomed my pitches to the Culture desk. I got to write about the Armed, a mysterious artist collective of hardcore musicians, as well as Viagra Boys, a Swedish post-punk outfit of satirical weirdos (which is a compliment).
Music writing is about flexing a slightly different muscle. I spend hours listening to a band’s back catalog before writing a profile pegged to a new album release. And interacting with musicians is different, to put it mildly, from networking with the Silicon Valley crowds.
But I find it refreshing, and often something that helps inject vibrancy into my other prose. Writing about an album can be vibes-based and colorful, which are qualities that can get lost when I’m trying to describe the latest graphics-processing unit or open-source software.
Thankfully, Times editors still let me dip back into the subject that brought me into the field in the first place — even if it’s only once in a while.
Mike Isaac is The Times’s Silicon Valley correspondent, based in San Francisco. He covers the world’s most consequential tech companies, and how they shape culture both online and offline.
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