Hello!

Greetings from the last music journalist to join Substack aka an introduction to The Bad Arts.

Did I, between 2019-2022, roll my eyes whenever someone announced that they were starting a newsletter? Absolutely. Did I, between 2023 and May 2024, contemplate the idea of starting a newsletter because the world of music journalism is so unpredictable and I wanted to have somewhere I could go on a regular basis to write about various albums or artists but stopped myself out of fear of someone rolling their eyes at me? Of course! It was in that final period, maybe around March ‘24, when I acknowledged that my performative aversion served as a mask which concealed my own desire to have such an outlet but didn’t feel as though anyone would care what I had to say.

Luckily, I’ve grown out of those irrational mindsets. I know that May of this year officially marked the end of that phase because I was reminded on Substack this morning, as I finally forced myself to sit down at my desk to finish setting it up. It was then that I had chosen my newsletter name, picked my profile’s colour theme (which I’ll most likely switch-up a million times in the coming weeks as a procrastination tool) and played around with some very basic logo design. Very, very basic logo design which took place in a Google Doc. All that was left to do was create my first post which you’re now reading.

There were a few motivations to start The Bad Arts — the name comes from a Destroyer song of the same title from their 2001 album, Streethawk: A Seduction — and chief amongst them was, obviously, to write about music. I also wanted to reconnect with a slightly more personal style of writing that I hadn’t done in years and was missing sitting down to do. When I started out in music journalism, one of my first regular outlets was a column for the sadly defunct State.ie compiling newly released music videos and introducing them with a theme that either related to the videos or some random thought that popped into my head an hour before I was due to file my copy. I loved that time so much because of the freedom I had in choosing the videos and writing about them. Unfortunately, the site shut down and the ensuing years have gone by in the blink of an eye.

In the last eighteen months or so, the energy I once had to discover albums independently from the ones I had to engage with for work had significantly dimmed. My ears were burnt-out and I preferred to listen to podcasts over albums in my free-time. However, on a recent solo-trip, I found myself really enjoying walking around a new city and rediscovering albums (aptly, more Destroyer work, Have We Met and Ken) I love in a new context. As I’m writing this, I actively put on an album (not by Destroyer but one which will most likely be the inspiration for the first post proper of The Bad Arts) that I’d been meaning to listen to for ages but hadn’t because when I’ve put something on lately (podcasts included) in my spare time my mind becomes distracted and detached which results in me feeling frustrated for not properly engaging.

I had put a mental-block on things that I never had to think about before; listening to an album on a bus journey, going down online rabbit holes discovering “related artists” based on my latest obsession. The album I’m listening to now is making me intrigued to read interviews with the artists about the making of the music and has gotten me thinking about some of the circumstances surrounding it that I’m already aware of.

And, as I mentioned earlier, the world of music journalism can be so uncertain. Publications are either shutting down or their output has to adhere to a certain tone or your pitches are lost to an editor’s over-stuffed spam folder. I just want to be able to write about Supertramp for fun. I’m really not asking for a lot!

I also wanted to create a space to do interviews in different formats to the ones I do for the brilliant sites I presently contribute to. Maybe that’s picking a particular theme to talk about or finishing each conversation by asking what animated character from tv or film they most relate to. Of course, I’ll be taking everything I make for this newsletter seriously, I’m also starting this with the hope that my writing gets better and I find new ways to explore and examine music.

Ultimately, though, I want there to be a lightness and curiosity anchoring these features and for whatever I share with you on The Bad Arts to be fun for me to make and for you to read.