Hadreas explained in GQ that he started his Substack after beginning to feel stuck in the rut of the album cycle. Many musicians also seem to crave the freedom to release low-stakes projects without going through a label at all. Substack allows us to create a full home for our project.” Pieces of the story are everywhere, if you’re a fan you’re gonna have to go out and find the story in a million places. “It’s weird … the digital age has allowed so much access, but it’s very piecemeal. “No journalist can sit down with me for three hours and get the whole story,” says Tegan. Simultaneously, the music press that covers these releases has atrophied to just a handful of websites, verticals and full-time journalists, from whom indie bands must scrap for their attention. Musicians deliver albums, music videos and other assets on a strict schedule that leaves little room for experimentation. “I just follow what makes me laugh the hardest or feel the most intensely,” he said, contrasting this to his approach to music, about which he’s “dead serious”. Hadreas told GQ in October that he had “no idea” his fans would enjoy his writing so much. His entries are so bizarre and skillful they’ve been written up in LitHub. His entries include an erotic short story about being swallowed alive by the actor Jensen Ackles (“Formed into pure cum energy, I cascaded through his urethra like a great sloshing sea.”) and a sincere review of granola brands (“Too many seeds and ancient grains, would prefer higher oat ratio.”). Perhaps most adventurous is Perfume Genius’s Substack, on which he’s been writing experimental fiction and satire. While Neko Case’s posts have a naturalist quality: whimsical essays about magpies and milkweed, that spin off in literary directions. Recently, he wrote a short story about a man in Barcelona who falls in love with a pickpocket. Incubus frontman Boyd shares paintings, as well as cerebral diatribes on UFOS and his pandemic break-up. “Just, ‘Hey, check this out.’”īrandon Boyd, frontman for Incubus, shares paintings, short stories and general musings on Substack. “Substack is a really lovely place to share a work in progress,” he says. Jeff Tweedy, the 54-year-old frontman of Wilco shares more audio than writing, including demos, covers and drafts of original poems and lyrics. “We want to cater to people who want to read essays about music and also the people who want to know about Sara’s cats,” says Tegan. Tegan and Sara’s newsletter, which has the glossy, soothing energy of the Modern Love podcast, is a series of candid letters between the twin musicians, that serve as a retrospective on their career (the lyrics they fought over, their first big check for a Grey’s Anatomy sync) and their relationship. The results are a mix of the parasocial and the profound, that highlight the way the internet makes every musician, no matter how small, an influencer.įor between $6/month up to $200/year (nearly all also offer a generous amount of content for free), fans can receive lush descriptions of Patti Smith’s hearty pre-tour breakfasts (“Toast, olive oil, porridge and banana smoothie, side of beans, berries”) as well as chapters of her pandemic novel The Melting. Morby is among a growing number of mostly indie rock artists who’ve joined Substack in the past two years: headliners include Patti Smith, Jeff Tweedy, Perfume Genius’s Mike Hadreas, Neko Case, Tegan and Sara, Thao Nguyen, Incubus’s Brandon Boyd, and The Decemberists’ Colin Malloy.Įach of these musicians now essentially serves as the editor-in-chief of a niche online publication about themselves.
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