Good morning.
At the end of last year I sent a little update to let you all know that this newsletter would continue, but just under a different format.
Well, that day has come. Next week, I’ll be starting a month long “season” of newsletters that aren’t focused on the media industry or audience development. Instead, what will be appearing in your inbox over the next five weeks will be a series of personal essays that I’ve worked on over the last few months.
What are these essays about? I’m not really sure. But what organizes them is the fact that they are about specific movies, albums, or songs that are either rooted firmly in a place or that always remind me of a specific place. Sometimes, they do both: by being a work of art or a document about a specific place they somehow become more about the place that I associate them with or the place(s) I was in while I was processing them. Four of the essays will be brand new and one of them will be a rerun of a longer piece of writing I shared at the end of one of my newsletters back in 2020.
Does that sound a little heady? Or does it sound a little bit basic? Again, I’m not really sure. All I know is that I had a lot of fun working on these and they allowed me to do some writing that I haven’t done that much of over the last two years or so. I’m looking forward to sending them to you all, if only simply to have some new writing out in the world.
As I said back in December, I completely understand if this isn’t what you hit that subscribe button for—so no hard feelings if you feel the need to churn (sorry, had to throw some industry lingo in there). But hopefully you’ll stay along for the ride and give me some feedback so I can get better for the next season later this year.
That’s it for now. Stay tuned next week for the first essay. Spoiler alert: It is LONG. But why else have a Substack if you can’t write really long when you want to?
—Matt