The house position, on the record, in plain language.
Manifesto
An opinion is only worth printing if you can name the rule it descends from — and defend the rule next month when it costs you something.
Long bio
I write the front of the book. Jason runs the rig diaries — what came off the board, what stayed, the slow technical accounting of a working setup. Those columns are a log. Mine are a position. When Suede says a thing — about the industry, about the instrument, about a record that everyone else is wrong about — that is the column I write, and I sign my name to it.
The Suede 100 went out under my byline last year, ratified by the Editorial Board. It is the clearest statement we have made about who this publication is for and who it is not. The columns that follow it work the same way: declarative, defended, and willing to be wrong in public if the rule that produced the call turns out to be the wrong rule. We do not hedge here. We do not run both sides. If we are not sure, we do not publish — and if we publish, we mean it.
Background
Started on a borrowed Telecaster at twelve, in a finished basement in West Orange, with an uncle who taught me three chords and a moral framework about tone that I have not fully shaken. Played in a loud, badly-dressed two-guitar band through high school and the first two years of a college degree I did not finish. The formative scene was not the band — it was the back room of a record store on Bleecker where the owner used to argue with customers about whether a reissue counted. That is where the voice came from. Stopped playing seriously around twenty-six, started writing about it instead, and discovered I had more to say with a column than with a strap. Founded Suede a few years later to build the publication I had wanted to read.
Biography
Born in Newark, moved through a handful of rooms in Jersey City and the Lower East Side before settling in a fourth-floor walkup in Greenpoint that has held me longer than any of them. Most weeknights end at the same corner bar near the BQE on-ramp, in a booth where the lamp is dim enough that I can read galleys without anyone bothering me. The apartment is smaller than the record collection deserves and the record collection is smaller than the opinions about it. I do not drive, which is a problem I have made everyone else's. Friends are mostly editors, a few musicians, one luthier in Red Hook who has been threatening to retire since 2014 and will outlive us all. The writing happens early — five-thirty, six — and the rest of the day is for the company.
Currently writing about
The next quarter is three brand-voice columns: one on why the guitar press has been wrong about reissues for fifteen years, one on what a working musician actually owes a venue, and the standing position piece on what Suede will and will not cover. The Suede 100 sequel is in editing.
