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Get in TouchArguably the world’s best electronic music journalist just wants to grow tomatoes.
How’s this for lucky: I first met Philip Sherburne—possibly the preeminent electronic music journalist of his generation—in 2002, because he was friends with my college roommate, and they produced a DJ night together at a local bar in the San Francisco neighborhood where I lived. We’ve been colleagues ever since—first at the alt-weekly SF Weekly, then o.g. streaming service Rhapsody, then Spin, and now Third Bridge Creative, where he’s completed over 11,000 assignments for TBC clients since joining the crew as a founding team member in 2015.
Sherburne is best known for his coverage of electronic music, regularly spotlighting the genre’s most compelling new artists. But he grew up on punk and hardcore, and it’s not uncommon to find him opining about artists like Cat Power or Smog. The guy just loves music, and writing, and both these facts come screaming off the screen when you read him. These days, he lives in Menorca, Spain, with his wife and daughter. It’s no small feat to forge a 20-year career writing about underground sounds, but Sherburne’s managed to make it look easy. Here, we discuss how he did it.
I studied English lit in college, and when I got out I had no idea what I wanted to do. And then I went to graduate school, and I was not particularly enamored of graduate school. I was in Providence, Rhode Island, and because I was a music obsessive, I started doing some record reviews for a local Providence college publication. Then—I think it was ‘98—I pitched the Wire magazine on a piece on Plug Research, which was this label in Los Angeles. And I flew myself to Los Angeles to spend a weekend with those guys. I think the Wire paved the way for XLR8R and then SF Weekly around the same time. And then yeah, just one thing after another.
I guess that was 2002. During that time I was beginning to write; I was working at Ask Jeeves, which is a search engine the older Gen Xers will remember. I was there for the Bay Area’s first big tech boom. And then everyone started getting laid off, and so around the time that I got laid off, I managed to step into a part-time role as San Francisco editor of FlavorPill. And so that covered my rent, basically, and that allowed me to freelance on top of that. And so I was very lucky because from that point on, I had a writing gig that could cover my rent and so everything above and beyond that was sort of gravy.
I think a lot of it is luck, kind of being in the right place at the right time. Like how I just happened to land this one anchor gig at the same time that I was getting laid off from this other job. And I was lucky that I continued to get a succession of anchor gigs like that. There was Rhapsody for many years. Then there was a period when I was living in Berlin, and I had a gig with Beatport. And then I went from Beatport to Spin as a contributing editor, and then I went to Pitchfork, where I've been for the last nine years. So it’s just a lot of luck, being able to get those anchor gigs.
Definitely in my 30s, like mid- to late 30s. For a long time, I didn't have health insurance, and then I got into some credit-card debt too, just because some of that I carried from grad school. And so it was actually in Berlin when I got a semi-decent paying job, and rent was cheap. And that’s when I said “Okay, I need to get this shit together.” And since then saving became a focus. Because it's a precarious, precarious industry, you know?
Yeah, I worry about it a little bit. I think it's something that I’m probably not doing enough to address.
Yeah, there’s that. And I’m growing a garden so, you know, if worse comes to worst… Honestly the stuff I worry about is like droughts and floods and plagues, as much as anything these days, as much as 401(K)s.
That's part of why I want to garden, ya know? I want tomatoes, at least. I'm probably fooling myself though, because I think feeding yourself and your family from your own garden is probably well beyond my skills, but you’ve got to start somewhere.
Yeah, I don't think it's as methodical as it wants to be. But basically everything that looks potentially interesting to me, either a record that I might conceivably review, or at least that I want to consider, goes into a Google spreadsheet, with basic data—artist, title, label, format, release day—and I take all of those and I download all those promos. And then there's the stuff that I come across randomly, on Bandcamp or wherever. A lot of it's just chance and aleatory. Every month I discover stuff that blows me away that I still just get so much pleasure out of writing about, so something's working.
I did.
I think the importance of good writing is only going to increase because you look at the ChatGPT stuff and it's a semi-convincing mimicry of human speech and prosody and writing, but when you start looking at it with an editor's eye, you're like, “Wait, but what is it actually saying?”
I don't feel personal, professional anxiety, although maybe I should—like ask me in a year when I've lost all my jobs and I’m making Molotov cocktails in my basement lair with an Edward Albee shirt on—but no, it hasn’t caused me anxiety.
I'm also anxious about what it could do to music because we already see the sort of flood of content that's created simply for playlists, and now throw AI at that. And so what happens when Spotify is suddenly overloaded with AI music?
Yeah, this is going to be like that times a million.
It was like an artist called “Dubstep” with a record called Dubstep and then the songs would be called “100 BPM Workout Mix.”
But it was pointing in that direction.
It’s difficult. I think in some ways, it's kind of organic. Like, I've just found a mix of work that works for me. Pitchfork, Third Bridge, the record label… That's a good mix. I'm working on an essay right now for a major European arts festival, and I'm kind of wishing I hadn't taken it on because I think that my balance is off. It's just one extra thing and it's just on my mind always, and it's like, "Can I hang out with my family this weekend? Or should I finish this thing?" So yeah, you make some choices. But I think the work tends to expand to fill the available time for it. So I also think it's important to make time to do things with your family. My wife and I have started going to the gym three times a week. And it's two hours a day, three times a week, but it's two hours a day that I'm not on Twitter.
I do. I get emails from people sometimes. I think there's one thing that I left out when you asked what made it possible for me to do what I do. Like many other people, I just happened to come up at a time when blogging was—I was about to say viable but not viable because nobody made money off it—but it was just a dynamic, exciting thing. And everybody was blogging and there was this exchange of ideas and it kind of overlapped with mailing-list culture and bulletin-board culture and just all of these people discussing music online. And it became a really good way to become a better writer. You know, I was lucky to come up with all the alt-weeklies, SF Weekly, stuff like that, but also with the blogosphere. And I think younger people coming up now—it's tough because they don't have the alt-weeklies, and blogs aren't really a thing. But I think the most important thing is to be writing, to be practicing writing to be getting better at writing, and then to be pitching outlets. And that's a whole other conversation, How to pitch, how to know who to pitch, where to pitch... but the writing is the first thing, and just practicing. And reading. It’s so obvious that it sounds kind of like a cop-out, but that's the only way to get better.
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