Summer Hiatus!

A different strategy for the dog days.....

A couple of weeks into June, a friend who has been following Echo Locator since the early days asked me about summer plans. Not gonna lie: It caught me off-guard. Summer plans this year are modest due to a kitchen renovation; there’s beachtime on the horizon and a couple of music projects waiting and that’s plenty.

After I shared about the running slate of topics and records I have planned for EL, we veered, as conversations about Substack tend to do, into the “Go Paid or Go Home” conundrum. I told the truth: I hadn’t had the necessary time to ponder it. I believe that writers who invest time and effort into these things should absolutely be paid, full stop. And that I’m grateful to every soul who has checked out these posts and then navigated toward some new sounds. And that writers should be grateful because Substack has already succeeded in changing the reading public’s thinking about writing as professional endeavor.

Then I confessed that I lack the skill (and, tbh, the will) to put the elbow grease into marketing and promotion of said endeavor. We laughed about how “going paid” can result in doing tons more free work, shouldering those other backofficey tasks as a kind of unpaid intern.

I’ve been writing about music since the early ‘80s. The vast majority of that work has been for cash dollars — as a staff critic at metro dailies and as a freelancer contributing to lots of magazines, as part of a team of reviewers at NPR’s All Things Considered, etc. These were places that had in-built audiences; I didn’t have to bring my own. Like so many colleagues, I’ve watched the outlets close and the options shrink and really smart voices disappear. It’s happened in so many realms — including music itself of course — that it’s not even surprising anymore. But the collateral damage is impossible to ignore: The discourse itself diminishing, nuances of art and essay-writing vanishing before our eyes. The massive shift we’re in the middle of needs more witnesses, not fewer.

But maybe not in the middle of summer!

So….I’m doing a hiatus from Echo Locator, taking what remains of the summer off. This one short little conversation made me realize that I’ve been avoiding the practical and existential questions surrounding Free vs. Paid, and if I’ve learned anything from the mental wellbeing experts around here, it’s that avoidance is not healthy.

With any luck we’ll pick up after Labor Day, either still free or behind some basic non-gimmicky subscription. (Vote in the Comments!) Maybe by then I’ll have found something cogent to say about this absolutely thrilling live document from John Coltrane and Eric Dolphy that was released today: