Former (and current) touring musicians really have an unfair leg up(?) on this one, but I remember a particularly brutal non-stop overnight drive from Phoenix to Dallas that involved a swarm of locusts, the Texas State Patrol, and sleeping with cold water bottles as pillows when we arrived.

Such a pleasure to be on the Monki Gras stage again after (checks notes) 14 years. One of those "wow this is a room full of overwhelmingly interesting and smart and kind people" moments. @monkchips.com you are a true friend and a force of good.

@mattlemay.com crushing it at #monkigras on planning and uncertainty. Closing out the conference in style.

still waiting for glenn danzig to tell me all about it now

ok, hear me out, an australian drag queen called "sharon howell"

Lin-Manuel Miranda and Martin Shkreli.

This is excellent.

when people ask me why i'm so invested in pitchfork allowing comments on old reviews

brb gonna start charging a monthly subscription fee to disagree with me

so... who will i be seeing at life without buildings in november?

Please repeat after me: Everything bagel, not toasted, plain shmear.

The Gen Zs at the financial district bar where I’m watching the inauguration are going absolutely fucking crazy over Lucy Dacus and I love it so much

i watched the family stone last night, why did nobody tell me that this movie is completely insane and unhinged

i am "the knitting factory is on leonard street" years old, as opposed to "the knitting factory is on houston street" years old or "the knitting factory is on metropolitan ave" years old

While we're talking bandcamp, um, I made this record with my friend Todd in 2022 and I think it absolutely slaps. goldlame.bandcamp.com/album/going

many have speculated that "greensleeves" was written about a prostitute, but what fewer know is that it was actually written about a male prostitute called peensteve

Orestes Morfin playing 🥁 with Walt Mink. Don't think there's any other bit of drumming that has resonated with me in quite the same way as the last bit of "Betty". www.youtube.com/watch?v=CO7K...

oh no it's leaf blower season

Occasionally I encounter folks in my techy business-y travels who ask about my work at Pitchfork. This is far and away the best message that such an interaction has yielded.

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood

you call it a "kick in the dick" i call it a "tube strike"

me, blending in

been spending the last two weeks trying to make sense of an eventide h90 pedal. it is a powerful and versatile piece of kit but, to broadly paraphrase a quote from @beautypill.bsky.social that lives rent-free in my head, it feels like it was designed by an incel who hates the world

one thing getting lost in the poptimism discourse is how much it sucked ass to be in a pretty good guitar-driven rock band circa 2006

for real tho i miss talking shit w my music writer ppl, y'all are the best

tbh the whole exercise of looking at the "state of music criticism" feels vastly secondary to the exercise of looking at the state of the potential audience for music criticism and the state of the monetization of the potential audience for music criticism etc etc......

I had a dream last night that I was the proud parent of two very snuggly cats called Fatty and Stinky and it is honestly the best dream I've had in recent memory

lol

i contain MOLTO TOOTS [farts in Italian]

BUY MY BOOK www.amazon.com/Impact-first...

if we're going by the waiters and not the food temperature, definitely "raw" 👀

aidan because even though he is marginally less annoying in general he has exponentially more screen time

just rewatched all of the original sex and the city series for the billionth time ask me anything

This new book by @mattlemay.com looks good! www.amazon.co.uk/Impact-first...

Psssst. Could use some help w/ some early Amazon reviews for the book that I'm *officially* releasing on March 10th. Anyone interested? (It's a book about product management, not a book about music, though my network here seems to be delightfully split across both worlds!)

I had a dream last night that I'm pretty sure was my subconscious mind telling me just how much I miss playing live music. Anyone in London looking for a guitarist or a drummer? Let's get weird.

London product people! This is gonna be a lot of fun. I hope to see some of you there. Thank you, as ever, @oneknightinproduct.com for bringing folks together.

Sorry

after 20 classes and the purchase of some grippy socks, i think i am officially a reformer pilates girlie now? ask me anything.

Uncharacteristically work-related post, but I've been using this readme/style guide to gather feedback on important docs like quarterly OKRs, product charters, strategic initiatives, etc. I've found this really helpful and I hope some of you will, too! docs.google.com/document/d/1...

if em dashes are a telltale sign of ai-generated slop then everything I've ever written is ai-generated slop oops

Last night I literally dreamed up an early 90s romcom called "IT'S A SMART SYSTEM" in which Kevin Kline and Goldie Hawn are colleagues at a company selling a new kind of adjustable bed, and most of the movie is about the different couples coming in to buy (and return) the bed.

same

Your periodic reminder that Casey Dienel (fka White Hinterland) made a 2024 pop girlie album in 2017 caseydienel.bandcamp.com/album/imitat...

I wrote this, about the growing tension between "art" and "content", nearly 15 years ago. Makes the era of lifestyle brand sponcon and flag-planting bloggers seem... remarkably inoffensive and vaguely nostalgia-worthy compared to today's streaming service ubiquity? medium.com/@mattlemay/a...

this song is about how the "bass gonna do what the bass always does" but aside from a not-terribly-boomy kick drum there is actually no bass in this song and i fucking love it music.apple.com/gb/album/sug...

fkkin british-ass email

"jack off to lyrics by leonard cohen" except it's "derive perpetual low-level ambient pleasure from the knowledge that joni mitchell's 'a case of you' is a sick burn on leonard cohen that co-opts and inverts his poetic lexicon to point out that he is actually kinda weak sauce"

me in 2004: "pop music is idiotic nonsense for vapid morons" me in 2024: "omg i got tickets for the rebecca black presale!!!!" (i did, in fact, get tickets for the rebecca black presale)