I started writing about music almost by accident. I started my first blog sometime around the end of 2009 or beginning of 2010. I also played bass — I still do, kind of, although not nearly as much as I would like — and at some point Franco Ruarte, director of Noche Polar, at the time the number one magazine in Patagonia, saw the obvious connection before I did. “You write and you're a musician. Why don't you write about music?” So I did. And then it became my main thing. Not just something I wrote about, but pretty much everything I dreamed about doing professionally. I loved music. I still love music. And somehow journalism gave me permission to enter that world from the other side.
Over the years, I interviewed musicians I had grown up listening to. I interviewed Marky Ramone twice and CJ Ramone. I have a recording somewhere of Luke Pritchard from The Kooks saying, “Hello, Florencia.” I covered Lollapalooza Argentina. I wrote for Billboard. I reviewed albums and bands. Eventually, I wrote the first book about Patagonian music. There are probably a hundred things I did that I don't remember anymore. But there are some things I learned.
Your favorite musicians are people
This sounds incredibly obvious until you're sitting in front of one of your favorite musicians and trying to remember how human conversation works. During my first interviews, I used to get incredibly nervous. And because many of them happened over Skype — from Patagonia, with Patagonian internet — one of my biggest fears wasn't even the interview itself. It was the connection dying. Or the phone not working. Or some technical catastrophe happening while someone I had listened to for years was waiting on the other side. Eventually, I started reminding myself of something very simple: they're people. Talk to them normally. Most people don't particularly enjoy being treated as if they aren't human. Of course, some do. But mostly, I've found that people want you to say hello, ask how they are, do your job and have a conversation. You don't need to immediately ask for a photograph or an autograph even when internally you are absolutely dying to do both. Just chill. Or at least appear to chill.
When I interviewed Marky Ramone for the first time, this required considerable effort. I've been a Ramones fan since I was around 15. I even have a Ramones tattoo. I travelled with my friend Seba Pardo from Pardo Guitars, a luthier who now lives in Barcelona and works with some of the best musicians in Latin America. We interviewed Marky and then, at some point, we were having lunch. Marcelo Gallo, another important name in the punk scene, was there. And then Michale Graves from Misfits, who was playing with Marky at the time, simply appeared next to us and ordered a coffee with milk. And you're sitting there thinking: That's Michale Graves. But outwardly you're just...Fine. Completely normal. Having lunch. At the end, of course, I asked Marky for a picture. I'm not insane.
The second time I interviewed him, I called him at his house. At some point the telephone connection dropped. So I called Marky Ramone back. And after the interview I remember sitting there with a glass of wine, finally allowing myself to process the fact that this had just happened. Maybe that's the first thing music journalism taught me: you can be completely fascinated by someone and still meet them as a person.
It's not about you
This one took me a little longer to learn. When you're young and suddenly getting access to people and places you once only saw from the outside, there is a very strong temptation to make sure everyone knows that you were there. I definitely did this. I interviewed Marcelo Burlon, huge name in fashion and a sull rockstar, when I was around 22. He was in Ibiza and, as many of my interviews happened back then, we spoke over Skype. At the beginning of the call, he told me I was cute. And I wanted to put that in the interview. Not because it had anything to do with the story. Not because it told the reader anything interesting about Marcelo Burlon. I simply wanted everyone reading it to know that Marcelo Burlon thought I was cute. Which, looking back, is absolutely cringe. But I was 22. Of course I wanted to be seen. I had suddenly found myself talking to all these people I admired, and some part of me wanted to say: Look! I'm here! This happened to me! Eventually, journalism taught me that the story isn't about you.If you're interviewing a musician, people came to hear the musician's story. Let them talk. Your job isn't to show everyone how clever your questions are, how close you got to them or what they thought about you. A good interview doesn't necessarily make the interviewer the most interesting person in the room. The best thing you can do is almost disappear. And strangely enough, I think I learned that lesson a little too well.
I spent years behind other people's stories. First musicians and artists, and later brands and clients. I became very comfortable putting my own perspective aside and asking instead: What are we trying to communicate? What does this person need? What does this client need? What serves the story? That's an incredibly useful thing to learn. I see the opposite happen all the time now, especially with content creation. A photographer is hired to shoot something for a client, but becomes more concerned with making behind-the-scenes content for their own Instagram than with the photographs they're actually there to make. Of course we all need to show our work. I do too. But the person paying you shouldn't become a prop for your personal brand.
The work comes first. The funny thing is that now I'm learning the other half of that lesson. After spending so many years making it not about me, at some point I started behaving as though none of my own stuff mattered. My stories weren't important. My perspective could stay behind the scenes. The client mattered. The work mattered. The person in front of me mattered. And now I'm finding my way back from that. Because there's a difference between making everything about yourself and allowing yourself to exist in your own work. Maybe that's partly why I have a blog. There are places where the story isn't about me. And there are places where it absolutely can be.
Know what you're talking about
I come from academia, so perhaps I never stood much of a chance with this one. I studied. A lot. If I was approaching a genre, an artist or a particular subject, I wanted to understand what I was talking about. I read Simon Frith and Greil Marcus. I read Pablo Alabarces and his work on popular culture. I took workshops with Sergio Marchi. Sergio Pujol was one of my teachers. I read journalists, theory, biographies and memoirs. I still do. One of the most recent ones was Jarvis Cocker's Good Pop, Bad Pop, which I absolutely loved. There is an enormous difference between having an opinion about music and knowing how to think about music. And I think journalism taught me to respect that difference. You can love something instinctively. You can hate something instinctively. But if you're going to sit down and interview someone, review their album, contextualise their work or tell somebody else why any of it matters, you should know what you're talking about.
Prepare. And then be willing to throw the preparation away
I used to prepare interviews obsessively. I wanted good questions. I wanted to know what the person had already been asked a thousand times so I wouldn't ask exactly the same thing. I wanted to find something they hadn't discussed before. And that's still how I think you should prepare. But one of the best lessons I got was learning that once the interview starts, you have to be willing to abandon the interview you prepared. I remember interviewing one of Argentina's biggest punk bands early in my career. At some point, one of the musicians started singing in the middle of the interview. Just to be funny. And instead of enjoying the fact that something interesting and completely unscripted was happening in front of me, I panicked. I was thinking: We have to get back to the interview. Afterwards, the producer told me something I've never forgotten. Next time something like that happens, go with it. Ask him to sing another song. Ask something about what just happened. Follow it. Not everything needs to happen according to the rules. And sometimes the thing you didn't plan is much better than the thing you did.
An interview is a conversation
That lesson changed the way I interviewed people. You have your questions. You have your research. You know where you want to go. But you also have to listen. That's actually the whole point. An interview isn't a questionnaire performed out loud. It's a public conversation. If someone says something interesting and you're already thinking about question number seven, you've lost something. You have to be present enough to notice the unexpected sentence. The hesitation. The joke. The thing they suddenly become excited about. And then you have to be willing to follow them there. I also always tried to be nice. That sounds like an absurdly small thing to call a professional lesson, but I don't think it is. I wanted people to feel comfortable talking to me. I wanted to create some kind of empathy, to make the person sitting opposite me feel that this was a safe and enjoyable conversation. Not fake nice. Not strategic nice. Just the way I would want someone to approach me. And very often, that's when you get the best out of people.
Learn to be fast
Journalism also taught me speed. News is fast. Festivals are fast. Concerts are fast. Album releases are fast. If you're covering something that happened tonight, publishing the perfect article three weeks later isn't necessarily very useful. So you learn to make decisions quickly. But being fast doesn't mean knowing less. The reason you can make good decisions quickly is because you've spent years building the background that allows you to recognise what's important. You learn how to discriminate between good information and bad information. What needs checking. What matters. What doesn't. What belongs in the story and what can disappear. You learn to write when you're tired. You learn to decide. And you learn to deliver.
And then, polish it
This might sound contradictory after saying journalism taught me to be fast, but I don't think it is. Be fast when speed matters. Take your time when time makes something better. Some of the best things are thought through. Research them. Write them. Leave them alone. Come back. Move something. Delete something you loved because it doesn't belong there. Find the sentence you were actually trying to write. Journalism taught me both things: how to work very quickly and how to recognise when something deserves more time. Maybe that's one of the things I've carried most clearly into everything I've done afterwards.
You can be a fan and still do the work
I don't think loving the thing you write about makes you less serious. For me, it was the reason I started. I played bass. I went to shows. I read about music when nobody was paying me to read about music. I wanted to know who produced an album, where a sound came from, what scene a band belonged to and what somebody had been listening to when they made something I loved. Being a fan gave me curiosity. Journalism gave that curiosity structure. Of course, at some point you have to separate the person sitting in front of you from the person you've constructed in your head. You have to be able to ask questions. You have to be able to dislike an album. You have to do the job. But I never wanted to become so professional that music stopped exciting me. And thankfully, it never did.
You decide what your age looks like
When I was at the height of my music journalism years, I was still very young. I was probably somewhere between 25 and 27, although by then I had already been doing it for more than five years. And I was constantly surrounded by people older than me. People in their thirties, forties, fifties, sometimes sixties. And they were the coolest people on Earth. I think that changed something very fundamental about the way I understood age. These weren't necessarily rock stars living some completely separate existence from everybody else. Especially in the independent music scene, many of the musicians I knew couldn't — and didn't — make their entire living from music. They had jobs. Some worked for the government. Some taught at universities. Some had companies. They had partners and children and responsibilities. Many of them were incredibly accomplished at whatever they did outside of music too. And then they got onstage. They made records. They rehearsed. They created things. They dressed however they wanted. They went to shows. They remained curious. They remained artists. Their jobs didn't cancel any of that out. Having children didn't cancel any of that out. Turning 40 or 50 or 60 certainly didn't cancel any of that out.
Until then, I think I had unconsciously absorbed the same idea a lot of us do: that certain things belong to certain ages. That eventually you're supposed to become a particular version of an adult. You settle down, become serious, and gradually leave certain parts of yourself behind. But I was surrounded by living evidence that you didn't have to. What made these people cool had very little to do with how old they were. It was the way they carried themselves through life. They had decided to keep making things. To keep being interested. To keep showing up for whatever mattered to them, even when there were jobs and bills and children and everything else that comes with being an adult. And I think that's one of the biggest lessons I took from that entire period of my life: You decide what your age looks like. One thing doesn't cancel the other. You can have a serious job and play in a band. You can raise children and make art. You can run a company and go to shows. You can be responsible without becoming boring. You can get older without slowly editing away all the things that made you interesting in the first place. I learned that when I was in my twenties, mostly from people much older than me. I don't think I understood then how much I would need that lesson later.
Once a rock journalist, always a rock journalist
I don't work as a rock journalist anymore in the way I once did. But when I think about it, an enormous amount of how I work now came from those years. Research before speaking. Prepare and then improvise. Listen. Be curious. Treat people normally regardless of the name attached to them. Work quickly when you need to. Polish when you can. Know enough about what you're doing that you can make decisions when there isn't time to overthink them. And maybe most importantly: stay interested. Music journalism gave me an excuse to be endlessly interested in things. Who made this? Why does it sound like that? Where did this come from? Who influenced whom? What's happening in this city? Why does this tiny band matter? What's the story nobody is telling yet? I don't think I realised until much later how much I loved living that way. Maybe that's why, all these years later, I can still pick up a record, a book, find a new place, meet someone interesting or stumble across something completely ordinary and immediately want to know more about it. And then, inevitably, I want to tell someone else. Maybe I stopped being a rock journalist. I'm not sure I ever stopped looking at the world like one.
