Welcome to Riding the Yellow Crane
My new newsletter!
Remember mp3 blogs? There once was a time a group of spunky independent music fans in the blogosphere could break a band and send them into Pitchfork and Vice notoriety. Influencers before we knew we were being influenced - in my teens and early twenties I would comb through blogs to discover bands no one I knew had heard of before. Add to that some style tips from fashion blogs and makeup tutorials from MAC obsessed netizens, Blogspot and Wordpress were the web hosts that crafted my entire personality.
At various times in the last 15 years I’ve been in the music industry I’ve contributed to “publications” that were definitely more like elevated blogs. I used to write an advice column for an outlet called Radio Cannon and then went on to start a couple blogs on the Montreal music scene with a friend called Bitchfork and The Administration. Both are now defunct, as is the friendship (but that’s a story for another time). I love to bask in long form prose, tease out an idea, pull it along through a few paragraphs and see what conclusion I end up with. Writing can be delightfully self-indulgent, yet also tedious, which softens the egocentrism for me a little bit. When I first got my Ask Hua Li column I remember showing a draft to the top cool girl in my life at the time and she told me no one wanted to read that much. It was disheartening to hear but thankfully the editor of the blog didn’t seem to mind and I got to keep writing long posts that I hoped people might want to spend some time with.
All these years later, those words echo in my mind. “No one’s going to read that much, can’t you say all of this in a couple sentences?” Damn. I feel my own attention span slipping too - I find myself skimming through slides of text when people have the GUMPTION to post loads of words on IG, the books that line the shelves of my home have become mere decoration, my credit card silently judges me every month when my NYT subscription gets charged to it. Can you say everything in 140 characters please, because no one has the time. Better yet, can you say it with some pop up text in a Tik Tok and put a nice soundtrack behind it?
When I can quiet the dopamine monster that feeds off bite-size info on the usual social media suspects and I actually read, wow, do I ever feel energized. For me, consuming social media feels like eating candy, and I justify my sugar cravings with the DUTY I have to produce content for the socials to keep my recording and touring artist profile alive. I too, am participating in the cycle, serving people tiny 15 sec clips of my music and highly curated carousels of my *ahem* highly aspirational life. Truthfully, most of the time I’m in a big t-shirt, working from home, anxiety snacking and wondering if anyone truly cares about my art or what I have to say. Reading a long form piece, a lot of the time, feels like the well-balanced home-cooked meal I long for. So here, at Riding the Yellow Crane, I hope to make some nice, delicious meals for you to enjoy. There will be the occasional post about music I’m releasing, but generally speaking I’m hoping I’ll find the time to really dive in on the socio-cultural side of music that really makes me tick. For me, Substack has provided a nice quiet corner of the internet where time slows down and I’m really happy to be landing here with this newsletter. Finally, a place where I can sit down and have a long chat with you <3.