Sometimes press folks send me advances of new records even though my days as a music critic — if you could ever really call me that — seem to be pretty much over. I would say that I used to have aspirations to end up in one of the major rags (“major” being a relative term), and although I think I tried pretty hard, maybe I didn’t really have the dedication that it took, or the self esteem to endure not so much the rejection but the overwhelming silence. All this on top of the very real possibility that I wasn’t talented enough to spend a day with my name on the front page under an album cover.

Or perhaps, more charitably to myself as I don’t really care to have a pity party here, I just didn’t have the right voice. This I would say is at least part of the truth. On one of the few occasions when I did get to publish under an attentive editor, I tended to really shudder under his instinct to standardize, shorten, simplify. It wasn’t that I couldn’t take criticism — typically I love the give and take of accepting feedback and refining ad nauseum, which is why I am still (yes, still) in graduate school. But I remember looking at some of my marked-up reviews and feeling like I had been sent out to sea, the raft I had built turned into a rowboat with smoothed edges and rounded corners. Some technical improvements, sure, but lost was what I was trying to say, where I was trying to go.

And yet, this was one of the only times when I felt I was gaining traction as a music writer, even if that phrase, too, should be taken relatively. It’s not that more people seemed to be reading my work. In those deep pandemic days, my only real gauge of understanding this metric was the number of likes on my tweeted links to articles, which I breathlessly sent in hopes of engendering some modicum of affirmation. On that level, I’d say that circulation was probably down, to be honest. But I was going through the motions of professionalism, or what I thought might constitute it. I was being asked to send invoices for my work (although the payment… let’s just say it didn’t seem to warrant this level of paperwork. Just venmo me 10 dollars). Blurbs from my reviews were being aggregated on Metacritic. The fact that this felt like an accomplishment was horrifying even at the time, but it also speaks toward the desperation I was feeling at the time to get anywhere at all as a writer.

It had always been slow going on this front, and maybe I should have taken a few lessons a bit more quickly than I did. Putting the whole talent thing aside for now, the signs were never particularly positive. In college, I started interning for a magazine that had been around since before I was born, had put all my favorite alt rock people on the cover. I wrote daily uncredited blurbs for their website and transcribed interviews. It was unpaid, often tedious work, but I often had a lot of fun and figured this was just paying dues. I spent a summer living in my sister’s tiny North Philly apartment, sleeping on a loveseat-sized couch (or else, on the cushion, folded out onto the ground), thinking I could go into their office every day and pretend I worked there until they started paying me. I thought that was how things worked.

The editor brought me and two other interns in for one day early in the summer. The office was near the convention center, and I remember how thrilled I was to ride the subway there in the morning. A Florida boy underground. Using tokens! (This was before the Septa Key was invented). Here I was, going to work in the city, at a real magazine. I listened to new mewithoutYou songs on the train (Pale Horses era) and hoped this could be my life.

The office as small and pretty ramshackle by that point, but to me it felt so real. Papers and past issues piled everywhere, haphazardly. Knotty wooden floors. Computers here and there. The space had no logic to it. But things happened here. This is where magazines were made.

The editor was nice but quite quiet, which matched up with the emails we had exchanged over the past several months, most of them just reading “Thanks.” I don’t think we talked about much that was relevant to the magazine. The editor told me that he and his wife had been dealing with some A/C issues at a property they apparently managed. The other two interns were quiet. We stayed for about an hour and the editor told us on leaving that he would let us know when we should come back into the office.

After that, I walked a while with one of the other interns — I believe he was from Scranton, the first of many people I would meet from that city, including my now-boyfriend. Of course, we talked about Tigers Jaw. I loved Charmer, which had gotten me through the turbulent end of a (straight!) relationship that had me feeling as wretched as the characters in “Cool” and “What Would You Do.” He was loyal to the early stuff which I hadn’t bothered to explore but pretended to revere. Maybe it could have been the tenuous basis of a real friendship, but I never got his name and I never heard from him again. I wondered how long he blurbed for.

The editor never called us back to the office, even though I asked every other week. I asked at one point if I could shadow the layout designer, and he said “I’m sure that could be arranged.” It never was, though. I spent the summer watching 30 Rock with my sister and trying to turn the daily blurbs into some kind of art. I really tried to describe these songs in a way that communicated how it felt to listen to them. I tried to give each one the time. This, actually, was probably valuable experience, but I could have gained it anywhere and the overflow from my student loans was running out. I took the subway to new neighborhoods and tutored a second grader in reading and writing. I tried to get more students but it was the summer and the kids probably had better things to do. On the train to my tutoring appointments, I’d fantasize about the editor at the magazine finally calling me back in and offering me a job on staff. Even in my fantasies, it still wasn’t much money, but it was enough to say that I had the job I wanted.

That, of course, never happened, and I came back home to Florida and sulked until it was time to go back to college in Tampa. I never saw that office again after that first day, although I’d go on blurbing and transcribing for an astonishing three years after that. In the meantime, I had graduated college, failed to get into graduate school, moved to Philadelphia, and tried relentlessly to get any job in media, anywhere on the east coast. But here I was discovering something — the alt weeklies had shuttered years ago. The staff writer jobs didn’t seem to exist. The emails I was told to contact bounced back. Even the unpaid or low-paying internships I was unqualified for. With all of these indicators that this whole thing was not looking too good for me, I held on to my attachment to the magazine even as I flopped home exhausted from service and assistant jobs.

Eventually, after receiving another assignment for a week’s blurbs and a 2-hour audio file for transcription, I replied back and begged the editor to give me something more to do after three years. And he did — “I’ll put you on the reviewer list.” Just like that. A week or two later, I got a list of records that hadn’t come out yet, and I replied with a smaller list of things I’d like to cover, stars in my eyes. I was assigned three reviews in the upcoming (print!!!!) issue. And he sent me the advances.

A word about advances. In my head, this was always the primary attribute of the music writer — that they heard the records early. When I was a young poster on websites like AbsolutePunk, I became obsessed with the idea of advance CDs or, later, advance downloads, of records. The reviewers on those sites would shock me when they would come on to the message boards and drop, often in spoiler tags, a small detail or lyric of a song that hadn’t yet been released, teasing all of the rest of us with their insider status. To my small little brain, this was the height of glamor, trumping even that of, say, actually meeting the artists (a thing I don’t think I ever desired much to do, as shy as I was, even though I came to like interviewing later). I longed to hear the work early, to be the one who had known about something special before it arrived. This is kind of stupid at the end of the day, and it definitely seems kind of quaint now when you look at the way reviews are published — rarely more than a few days before release. I will confess, though, that the right advance can still thrill me.

Anyway, I was happy to get to write about three bands I loved, even if these were capsule reviews with a word count barely longer than the blurbs I had toiled over for years. I got to write two very enthusiastic reviews (Wait for Love by Pianos Become the Teeth and the Saddle Creek reissue of Young Jesus’s S/T) and one absolute pan (A Productive Cough by Titus Andronicus, which still sucks). A copy of the issue arrived several weeks later with a paper check for 20 dollars. I smiled when I pulled them out of the mailbox. It took a long time to get here, and where I was was still basically nowhere, but I was finally moving forward.

Two weeks later I got an email from the editor saying that the advertising provider for the magazine had fallen out and print issues would go on hiatus until they found a new one. They never printed another issue after that.

All of this is to say that the ground under my feet was always shaky when it came to music writing, whether I had the talent or not. But I suppose the reason I’m thinking about all of this now has something to do with the more basic, generic emotions behind some of these experiences, these minor highs and seemingly endless disappointments. It has to do with the constant, cyclical line of thinking that seized my mind for all those years, of do I belong here? I must belong here… It doesn’t seem like I belong here… If I don’t belong here then where do I go? and on and on and on.

In some parts of my brain I think of this obsession as a youthful thing, something that many young people like me go through in their early 20s, motivated but clueless and somewhat delusional. But, then again, does it ever actually end, or does the intensity of this question just simmer down a bit? Because here’s how the rest of that story played out after that small peak in… professionalism? (again, relative) that I experienced during the pandemic (or maybe it’s about the attempt to be professional, the many unanswered pitch emails I sent, committed myself to sending, every week): I couldn’t make it work as a music writer, and I couldn’t take working the desk job in technology for another day. So I quit and went for my PhD — if I don’t belong there, I must belong here. And now, here I am, five years later, still working on my dissertation (I’d say it’s in a kind of development hell) and working another desk job. The dissertation, unsurprisingly, feels a lot like the music writing — although the tone of is anyone going to be around to read this feels a bit different, and more dire, now. Academia feels as shaky as magazines did a decade ago, although here I am again praying that it just works out anyway.

Where does this leave me? Did I waste ten years only to waste five more? Probably yes and no, and also remains to be seen. I am alive, and I have a great life, actually, and my inability to let go of the ideas I had about myself and what I should be doing hasn’t prevented me from getting on with it. I still write all the time with the hope that people will read someday and take something with them, albeit in a different context. And maybe that’s delusional but I also write because that is just simply what I do, talent or no talent. Whether or not I get to commute to the office by the convention center ever again.

I started this post by writing “sometimes press folks still send me advances” with the intention of actually writing about a specific record, but then all of…that kind of came out. Anyway, I wanted to hype the upcoming record from Hew, a new band featuring members of the Houston emo group football, etc. The record is called Your Version and for several weeks before I heard it, I was basically smitten with the pre-release single also called “Your Version.” It’s got that warm, downtrodden Mineral-esque guitar that makes me feel like I’m trotting through the snow even on this 90-degree day, as Lindsay Minton sings with an even calm about something that seems quite painful, heartbreaking. The song emerges into an anthemic refrain — “I won’t fight it anymore…” — that feels ripped of context in a certain way, a scrap lost from a diary that carries a strange power, even apart from the rest of the personal history to which it belongs.

The record delivers on the promise of the single. There’s a kind of restraint here which makes these songs feel like remnants from the past, that sneaky ability that emo music has to make you nostalgic for your own suffering. One of my favorite tracks on the record is “Lie in It,” which sports a chorus that’s nearly hymnal both in its rising cadence but also in its simple twist of the knife: “it’s not your bed, but you’ve got to lie in it.” This record is full of these moments, dramatic but almost stately, wise in the way that only pros of the form can be. In spite of this, the record can feel kind of understated — it’s not flashy, it’s quite bare in its presentation and low-key in its production. I worry that it will get overlooked, which is why I wanted to write about it here. But there’s a raw force here that I find terribly moving — a beauty in mourning that I keep comparing to Copeland’s classic debut Beneath Medicine Tree. This record is as sweet and reverent in the face of pain as that one is, and I hope as many people get to hear it and love it. It’s out on Tiny Engines July 10.

My name is Jordy Walsh, and I’m a writer based in Philadelphia. I Keep a Diary is a newsletter about music, books, and writing.