Josh Terry shares his journey as a music journalist in the modern age.
Josh Terry is a Chicago based music journalist and writer, beloved by many for his enthusiasm to spotlight local indie acts. He has worked for Vice, Netflix, and the Chicago Tribune, and now writes a weekly newsletter called No Expectations where he highlights new releases, interviews artists, and explores music news and culture. I got a chance to chat with Josh about his journey as a writer and music journalist—read our conversation below and check out No Expectations and consider subscribing for a thoughtful blog with many wonderful music, movie and TV recommendations (he already introduced me to some of my favorite albums of this year, see Radial Gate, Beloved! Paradise! Jazz!?, and Romantic Piano).
photo by Samantha Sacks.
David Feigelson: Do you want to start by giving a little background about yourself and your history in music journalism? I think you started with the A.V. Club in 2012?
JT: Exactly. I've been writing about music in Chicago for the last ten years, or a little more than that. It wasn't really something that I studied to do. There's no music journalism class.
DF: What did you study?
JT: I studied psychology. I was going to be a therapist. Then—I think my senior year, you might be feeling the same way—I was like, what the fuck am I doing? It was four years of studying one thing and that wasn’t the thing that I really wanted to do. But I also ended up triple minoring, kind of by accident because of the core classes we had to take. So I graduated with psychology and I had minors in political science, sociology, and English. For the English minor, I had to get an internship, so I got an internship with the Onion. The Onion and the A.V. Club are sister sites. I decided to just focus on the music side, and they needed someone to help out with music news at the A.V. Club. But I was only there for a few months, since it was just an internship.
After graduation, I was like, I could go to grad school, or I could try freelance writing. I think the hardest thing is getting a byline. Like, getting your foot in the door. And I just got really lucky that they asked for a writing sample. I literally sent them a psychology research paper. I didn't really have a blog or anything. I did well in the interview, and they asked me to do a sample news story. They gave me a chance. And I think being able to say I'd written for the A.V. Club, which at the time was a pretty cool website, was really helpful.
So after graduation, I sat on my ass for a couple months, and then I started working for a website called Consequence of Sound for like a year and a half. Then, I got a job at a newspaper called the RedEye, which was like the free edition of the Chicago Tribune, so it was more pop culture focused. It was like, every day, new paper. I was their music critic. I think I was 23 when I was hired there, and I worked there for two years. It was a big staff, with about twenty people. Unfortunately, now it no longer exists.
Basically, I was hired to be a pop music critic. Like, if Adele was releasing a new record, I’d write about that. I’d occasionally write about local artists too. But I was like, why don't we just write about Chicago music? We’re a Chicago paper. No one's gonna look me up and think, this guy's gonna have the best take on the Taylor Swift record. I haven't really been giving dates, but it was 2015 when I was hired at the RedEye. So you had Chance the Rapper starting to rise, like Acid Rap was a couple years ago. And there were so many great rappers and indie rock bands popping up around the same time. Twin Peaks were in high school around that time, and you had Whitney and many other bands. It was a fun time. I did two years of that, and then I got laid off. The paper shifted from daily to weekly, and the first section to go was the art section.
I was full time freelance from there. The first publication to reach out was Vice, so I freelanced for them for two years and then got hired on as a culture writer for two more years. I worked there from 2018 to 2021 and then got laid off. I took a job with Netflix, worked there for a few months, and I've just been freelancing since then. So yeah, basically my thing is Chicago music, but I write about a lot of different things. You do it for long enough and you realize that you sometimes have to write about TV or sports or whoever has an assignment. That’s basically the rambling bio.
DF: Thanks that’s great. You mentioned being mainly a Chicago based writer. What does Chicago mean to you? And why'd you stay here for so long?
JT: Well, it's just a great city to live in. I think by not being one of the coastal cities like New York or L.A., you get more of a down-to-earth kind of person. Rent is also still pretty cheap here, especially compared to what you can get in New York or L.A. And I think that makes it really good for artists. It’s kind of a more underground community that's for the art and for the music. I think the cheap rent fosters it but it's also because of the many independent venues that are here. There’s a good, supportive community. If you go to a show at the Empty Bottle on a Monday, it’s gonna be looking like a sold out show. And that’s cool. Most cities don't have that built-in ecosystem. And it’s not just the Empty Bottle, it’s Sleeping Village, it’s Schubas, it’s Golden Dagger, it's dozens of different venues. People in Chicago support the arts and we're not going to be pretentious about it. But yeah, I've stayed here just because I love it. I don't think I would be able to be as good of a music journalist if I moved elsewhere, because, you know, you do this for ten years and you get to know people. You know the bands, you know the artists, you know the people who book venues, you know the people who own venues. You know the community and what works and what doesn’t. I don't think I would want to immerse myself in a brand new community and have to build those relationships. Learn the way a new city works. It just doesn't make sense.
DF: Can you talk about your No Expectations project and the freedom it allows you as compared to when you're working elsewhere?
JT: Totally. So I started it in December of last year. And honestly, the more you freelance, the more you realize that there's either not enough time to write about everything that you want to write about, or that certain publications don't care about the same bands as you. So I decided to make an outlet where I can write about what I’m into. There’re so many bands that I listen to and think, this is the best band in the world, and then I go to Stereogum or NPR or a lot of publications I haven’t written for yet and they just pass. It’s fine, it’s the nature of the business, not every publication is going to love your idea. But I do think that after the years I've been doing it, some people just trust my taste. While I pay my bills writing about things that aren't music, I realized it'd be better to just have a place where it’s me writing about music. A lot of my writing, the way I pay my bills, is usually not publication facing. I'll write the bios for artists for press use. You know like if you get a press release from artists? The long bio thing is what I do. And it's not like, hey, cool, check out my bio. It's for journalists to ask questions and learn about the record. I love doing that because you get to talk to an artist first about something they just made. But it's not really something to say like, hey, go read the press release. It feels weird. So I think the No Expectations newsletter has allowed me to feel better about freelancing and not doing so much public facing work to pay my bills. It gives me an opportunity to write about what I care about. I’m not stressing out about like, oh, shit, I didn't write anything about this great band, because I have the newsletter.
DF: Yeah that's cool. One thing that you've started doing on No Expectations is the taste profile. I thought it'd be cool to do one of those for you.
JT: Haha, sure.
DF: Can you tell me about a formative album that really influenced how you think about or experience music?
JT: That's a good question. One of the most formative albums… I think it's just because it was an important time in my life when it came out. I was a music fan but it was rare that I would listen to an album a hundred times, because I wanted to find as much music as I could and discover new things. But I realized pretty early on that one of my favorite bands was Radiohead. Obviously, *laughs* look at me. But In Rainbows came out when I was in high school. That was in 2007, when you were starting to be on the internet, on forums. Like, Twitter was a new thing, but I was just on Facebook. And they did the whole pay-what-you-want thing, which was really cool. But it was also my favorite band, and had I gotten into them after they had kind of called a hiatus, because there was a four year break after Hail to the Thief. So people were thinking Radiohead was done and Thom Yorke was just gonna do these weird bleep bloop solo records forever. And so it was really cool when that album (In Rainbows) came out. I was too young to be a fan for Hail to the Thief. I was maybe ten when it came out and no ten year old is a Radiohead fan. I remember I stayed up super late to get the download, because I wanted to listen to it on my drive to school. So I'm driving to school, on like no sleep, and my mind was just blown. I loved it. Then, it kind-of-annoyingly made Radiohead my personality. I still think it's their best record. And I think it was just really formative because it was the first album that was an event for me instead of a discovery. Like, I was anticipating music from a band I already loved, and I wasn’t learning about it. I was along for the ride.
DF: That’s awesome. Can we do the same thing with a movie in your life?
JT: Yeah. I guess it's around the same time. My best friend lived across the street from me in Michigan, and we would listen to records, we both played guitar, and go to Blockbuster and pick up a few movies. I feel like in the 2000s, every bro went through the same journey, like, let’s watch The Shining, let’s watch Pulp Fiction, all that stuff. But one movie that I watched all the time, and I’m not even a horror film guy, was 28 Days Later. It's a zombie movie with Cillian Murphy, directed by Danny Boyle who did Slumdog Millionaire and a couple others. He’s kind of a controversial director because he can be corny sometimes, but he did a damn good job on this movie.
DF: Did he also do Trainspotting?
JT: Yeah he did. That’s another one of those movies that I loved in high school. I still love both. But 28 Days Later is a beautiful zombie movie. The soundtrack is really cool, it's got Godspeed You! Black Emperor in it. And I think it was sort of proto The Last of Us, in that it doesn’t just try to be a campy zombie thing, it tries to mean something else. It's a really cool movie. I loved it. I don’t know if it’s on streaming but you should watch it.
DF: Awesome. Do you have a formative book or piece of writing that comes to mind?
JT: Hmm. I could go a couple different directions with this. For music journalism specifically, there was a 60s and 70s music critic for the New Yorker named Ellen Willis. The book is called Out of the Vinyl Deeps. I don't love a lot of music writing that is regarded as the greatest. Like, Lester Bangs? Not my favorite writer. I like that he wrote with personality, but I never really connected with his work. He was like one of those 60s/70s dudes from Detroit, pre-magazine Rolling Stone. Philip Seymour Hoffman played a character that was supposed to be Lester Bangs in Almost Famous. But Ellen Willis, I just really liked her writing. I wanted to be a music journalist and I decided to read as much as I could. I think that's the most important thing, figuring out what you like. And Ellen Willis, her prose was just really good. The hardest thing to do is capture the feeling of listening to music. It’s not just what the artist is doing, but how it's making you feel, and how they’re accomplishing it. It’s a really hard thing to do, but it's really cool. I think reading that made me realize that you can be plain spoken, and not super pretentious, but still get at the heart of music.
DF: That makes sense. When I write about music I also try to convey my reaction or relationship with it. As I listen to an album over a number of years and live with a piece of music, I'll hear it differently at different times. What I've learned to love and appreciate so much is that growing relationship with it.
JT: Yeah. Like why do you write about music in the first place? Probably because you have a lot of fun talking with your friends about music. I want the writing to feel like that. I want it to feel conversational and accessible; I don’t want to make people feel stupid. Because you read certain kinds of writers who clearly went to grad school and want to show off how much they know. It doesn't really grab me. I think you have to do research and know the material, but there is a way to drop people in and explain those concepts simply and clearly.
DF: Do you feel like other media for music journalism have changed that accessibility gap? Now that there's a lot of YouTube criticism…
JT: Totally. I mean, you interviewed Kelsey (The Yellow Button). What she does is great. Although, it's not really criticism, It's more like curation and recommendation. But I think as cool as it is that there are mediums like Fantano and YouTube criticism, I don't think anything is going to eclipse the written word. Even if in popularity the TikToks and YouTubes replace it, I think the writing is less ephemeral. But it's good that people are engaging with music. Whatever gets you in the door is great. But I also think that writing is gonna be the thing that lasts.
DF: Yeah. I have a few questions about music in 2023. How do you find new music?
JT: Oh, man. Everyone has the list of blogs that they do, like trusted voices. I’ll read Pitchfork and Stereogum; Aquarium Drunkard is a favorite. I love finding stuff from them. But honestly, the way I find new music is literally through Instagram. Take, for instance, I was scrolling on Bandcamp recently and I found this songwriter, his name is Greg Freeman. He's from Vermont. And he just feels like he was made in a lab to hit all my tastes. He had already followed me on Instagram, super sweet guy, and he would post fish and bands from Vermont. And it was a new scene for me, I’ve never been there. Also, in Chicago, just go to a local show. If you're there for the headliner, the opener’s probably gonna be sick too. Rather than just scrolling through the algorithmic playlists, I think it's more local. It’s still through social media, but it’s a community of people. It's kind of more like group friends, which is a fun way to look at it.
DF: Honestly that's why I'm so grateful for Firebird.
JT: Yeah. Shout out to you guys for doing your own thing. I said this in a previous newsletter, but when I started, people said not to. There's no money in it anymore, there're like ten opportunities.
DF: And you said it's only gotten worse.
JT: Yeah, it’s gotten so much worse. Even at places that I did work, I don't know anyone who worked there anymore, because they've all gotten laid off or changed careers. It's just really tough, and I think the future is thinking about music and criticism as a local thing.
DF: Yeah, appreciate you saying that. As you mentioned, you sometimes find music at shows, have you seen any good ones recently? Or are you anticipating any?
JT: Yeah. I just moved to this neighborhood a couple months ago, and I've been traveling a bit, so I haven't gone to as many shows as normal. My friend played a show at this venue called Color Club on the north side. It's a relatively new one in Avondale. It’s around where Sleeping Village is, but a little more west. And she's a songwriter, her name is Le Ren. She's Canadian. She does acoustic folk, she sounds kind of like Joni Mitchell. But she had an opener, a Chicago kid, they performed as Red PK. I thought that was really cool. It was sort of like this John Fahey guitar music, but the songs were really good. It was just good stuff.
It's weird, because I feel like right now I kind of go in phases. I'll be like, here are these six great bands, and then I won't find anything new that I think is very good. Greg Freeman’s been a big one, there's a big community in Burlington, Vermont that is really cool. One of Greg Freeman's best friends is this dude Dari Bay, and he made what I think is the album of the year this year. It’s really cool rock, just good songwriting. And then in the newsletter today, I wrote about Greg Freeman’s guitarist, this dude Noah Kessey, and he just put out a record that I think is really amazing. So it's finding these small scenes, and seeing what their friends are making too. If you're a fan of a band, their friends are probably making pretty cool music too.
DF: Great. How do you think the streaming model of music affects musicians? Listening to music? Or the industry?
JT: In terms of the music or in terms of the industry?
DF: Either. I like to leave that question pretty open ended, but I've asked almost everyone that I've interviewed.
JT: Well, in the industry, I think you have to get such a certain point to make money off of it. I think it incentivizes artists to tour and find alternative sources of income. I think democratizing music so much has flattened the ways people can make money off of it. And by incentivizing artists to get on these algorithmic playlists, it's sort of homogenized the sound. You know, scroll through one of those Spotify playlists, and a lot of the bands kind of sound the same. I'm not saying it's intentional, but I do think that it has made musicians less rich, and incentivized some of them to sound like everyone else. I obviously use Spotify, I use Apple Music. I’m not saying give those up. Well, I might be. But I use it for the convenience of the job, but I don't think it's been a net good. I don't know. I think we're gonna have to figure out a way to pay people more, that’s really it.
DF: Yeah. I feel like I've had strange experiences on Spotify, where I'm listening to something that I really like, and then the autoplay—which Apple music doesn't do, and I really like that—will keep things on that are very similar, but I don't like them as much. And then I'll gaslight myself and be like, why am I not enjoying this? It's like a weird sensation.
JT: Yeah, it's tough to think about how much it's changed everyone's relationship to music. You're 21?
DF: Yeah.
JT: So you kind of don't know a world without Spotify?
DF: No, it was coming out in my formative middle school years.
JT: I had it in college, and that was ten years ago. Before that, you would go on iTunes or we would literally go to like, FYE and buy CDs. That was it. That was how you heard it. You couldn't check out all of recorded music. My way of discovering things was listening to the thirty second snippet on iTunes. I didn't get the whole song. That's crazy. Now I can listen to everything, whenever I want. Which is good, but I think it made even the things that I love a little more ephemeral. And it's not the fault of the albums. It's just like, well why don't I listen to this band's entire catalog today, instead of this thing that I love? Because I can. It’s the convenience. And I think the way you have to balance that is just to get out of the house, go to shows, and support it face to face, rather than just behind a laptop screen.
DF: I've taken some solace in seeing that communities like Bandcamp and other places that support artists are still doing well. The Epic buyout was concerning. But the vinyl resurgence has been good too, seeing that people are really willing to spend money on physical copies.
JT: Yeah, totally. There's a lot going on with that. The vinyl thing is cool. I obviously have quite a few records. That's the way people make money: Bandcamp, vinyl. Not really the streaming, unless you're at hundreds of thousands of monthly listeners.
DF: And at that point you're also going to have other sources of income.
JT: Probably. This is why you see a lot more bands getting their songs in commercials and other stuff.
DF: Okay, you said that you don't think the medium of music journalism and writing is gonna go anywhere. I'm curious what you think about the onset of all of this AI technology and how that might influence the direction of things?
JT: Well, I definitely think some enterprising media CEOs are going to think that AI can replace writing. But I don’t know man. Have you watched some of the videos? I know it's gonna get better, but people don't read criticism or read journalism for an impersonal, robotic take. And it’s not even really a take, it's just a regurgitated copy that this large language model has been programmed to output. There are no novel ideas. But I think it's gonna disrupt the industry. And we're already seeing it—CEOs are saying that they can help write. But studies have found that editors take more time editing AI copy because it’s inaccurate. I think with criticism, AI isn't gonna be what kills it. I don't think it can replace the human relationship that we have with music. You read critics for that and I don't think AI can replicate that sort of intangible feeling.
DF: That makes sense. A bit of an extension of the topic, do you have similar feelings about the AI vocals that have been coming out or AI songs in general?
JT: What's your take? Do you listen to any of that stuff?
DF: No.
JT. Yeah. The thing is, it's impressive as a meme, but there’s no humanity in it. Every day you see something that's gonna ~change the game~. It's Biggie Smalls singing about Arby's, made by AI! And it's okay, but there’s no real takeaway. There's no real struggle that went into it. There's no real story. I think it's going to only impress the people who are easily fooled, and who don’t think about art in any sort of serious way. If your relationship to music is, wouldn't it be crazy if Biggie Smalls sang about Arby's, then you're gonna love it. But I don't think it's gonna actually replace anything. I don't think an AI song is going to become a Hot 100 number one song, because people gravitate toward music because it's something that they can relate to. I think that while AI will get better, it won’t be able to replace good, human music.
DF: I agree. It’s been slightly concerning, on the one hand, to see lots of people listening to it, and kind of replacing some of the human music that they listen to. But I also think that those people probably don't, for the most part, fall into the category of really passionate music fans that are engaging with it in a way that you or I, or a lot of other people do. And I think those people are the most important in keeping these communities alive and in supporting artists. In that sense, I don't think there's anything that's particularly threatened, and potentially there will just be more cool tools we develop that artists can play with.
JT: Yeah. Aside from how it’s been used lately, when I think about AI, I think about how it could be used for people who are nonverbal to be able to model their voices and help them communicate. There are practical uses that make a lot of sense. But why do people want to replace writing and art with automated stuff? I think that AI would be a better CEO than a journalist. I think people are going to try to use it to disrupt and kick people out of work, but I think we're gonna figure out pretty soon that it's not really equipped to do these creative endeavors. It could be used for practical things, like software coding and stuff like that. But it’s not gonna be art. No matter what any person who paid eight dollars for a Twitter blue check says, it’s not gonna be art.
DF: Do you have a sense of what distinguishes art from this stuff? I feel like we've never really been face to face with so much that looks the same as art on the surface—with the visual stuff even more so than the audio stuff. One of the answers I've been drawn to is that there's a fundamental aspect of art that is communicative. Even if you don't know the specifics of what's being conveyed by a piece, you're under the impression that there is something being expressed.
JT: Right, there's a relationship between the person who made it and the person who's experiencing it.
DF: And it’s weird to have this AI stuff, because it looks the exact same, but it removes that.
JT: Yeah, it closes off a side of the relationship. And so it's not there. It's decoration. It's not art. Why would you want to write about art in the first place? Because there's context, and there are emotions that you're feeling from experiencing that art, and there's learning about the people who made it, which enriches the experience. You want to write about it because you're experiencing these emotions, and knowing about the art and how it was made makes your experience a little more fulfilling.
DF: Yeah definitely. I have a few more loose questions. In the spirit of today, May 4th, I'm curious about your opinions on the Star Wars movies.
JT: Oh man, I love the Star Wars movies. I was a huge nerd as a kid. We had the VHS set and my parents showed him to me at an early age. I saw The Phantom Menace in theaters. I didn't hate the prequels, I was a kid.
DF: Yeah I had all six DVDs as a kid.
JT: Yeah it was fucking sick. I love them. This is embarrassing, but when I was thirteen or twelve, I went to a Star Wars convention. The most recent movies were pretty cool. They're fun. The first one was like a retread of A New Hope. Second one was really cool. Didn't like the last one, but it’s fine. Like were you expecting Citizen Kane? Andor was great though, have you seen that one?
DF: No, I haven't explored that much outside of the main cannon.
JT: Yeah, I don't really do the Disney Plus shows, but Andor is actually good. It’s a legitimately good story. And it's not Jedis and shit; it’s in Star Wars, but it feels like the best spy thriller. Recommend it.
DF: Awesome. You also wrote an article recently about the Ed Sheeran case. He won.
JT: Oh yeah. He did, he beat it.
DF: Any reflections on that?
JT: I mean, what I hoped would happen happened. It was kind of a ridiculous case. If he were found liable, he would’ve had to pay a hundred million dollars to the co-writer of the song, and their only real arguments were the chord progression and the fact that he did a mash up of it. So yeah, I'm very happy. But I do think, because of the “Blurred Lines” case, there are still going to be pretty litigious estates trying to get people to pay up for something as coincidental as a chord progression in pop music. Yeah. Good for Ed.
DF: Cool. Couple more. Do you have any advice for aspiring music journalists?
JT: Yeah, just do it. The economic windows of opportunity to make a career are dwindling. But more people engaging with music in a thoughtful way is a good thing. These are the same questions I'm dealing with now. Ten years. I've made writing a career, but music journalism does not make money. I'm known as a music journalist, but I make money writing branded content and bios. It’s technically music writing. If you want to write about music for a living, I think you have to understand that there are ways to make money and still do it, but it's just not going to be music where you make money. But obviously, the more you write, the more you can pitch. There are always going to be publications taking freelance writers and doing assignments.
When I started, I wanted to be a music critic for one publication and stay there until I died or retired. I don't think that's a reasonable goal. It definitely wasn't then, and it's probably harder now. It's going to happen for some people, but it's not going to happen for 99%. I think focusing on the craft itself and why you love writing about music instead of the “how can I make this a career.” It sounds pretty unsatisfying, probably. But I think that you will appreciate the craft more, to do it yourself and untie it from the financial incentives. I feel like I'm a better writer for forcing myself to do this newsletter. Instead of doing a bunch of bios, and then writing one magazine profile every three months, it's better to be disciplined about it, think about it on your own terms, and craft your voice that way.
DF: Yeah. Lastly, do you want to leave anyone who will be reading this with any recommendations? Anything that you've been obsessed with recently?
JT: Oh, man. Go listen to Greg Freeman. I think that’s the one I’d go with. Good Looks from Texas is also a great band. So those two music things. Watch The Wire. I’m watching that right now. It's like my fifth rewatch, but my girlfriend hasn't seen it yet. So fucking good.
DF: Great, that’s it. Thanks for taking the time today.
JT: Awesome. Yeah of course. Thanks so much.
edited by David Hall.
photo by Samantha Sacks.
