So, What Else Happened? Writing Scrapbook 2024

At the end of my first year balancing full-time freelancing with fuller-time parenting, I am genuinely unsure of whether or not I see myself as a "writer." When I worked full-time, I used to make it a point to encourage aspiring creative people to see themselves as doing what they wanted to do, whether making music or writing or anything similar—even if they were working other jobs to actually survive. That was 10 years ago, and essentially no one making anything creative of substance is doing it full time, or they're massively underpaid for it, or both!

Despite my overarching cynicism about what capital has done to our creative pursuits, my parental responsibilities becoming much more fulfilling than anything else in my life, and the sinking suspicion that I may start seriously looking into other things to do for money in the years to come...I've actually written a lot this year. I'm proud of a good chunk of it, though there is a good 15-25% of it I do not remember doing, by virtue of the fact that my family doubled its human count this winter, and one of those humans spent more than a month in the hospital. So this is as informative for me as it might be for you.

Furthermore, one of my favorite subscribers—my father—is one of my most fastidious archivists. Whenever Duque's Delight sends an essay or list of some sort, he reads it, prints it out and places the writing in a folder for safe keeping. I'm sure they're stored not far from the bins of my high school and college journalism in the basement of the house I grew up in. If you're a writer—however you define that for yourself—may you have as loyal a reader as I do in my family. Dad, and everyone else: please click on any of the below links and you can print them out, too.

The Second Disc

My site about music reissues and box sets turns 15 this January, and against all odds, I still get to conduct some interviews and write some features I'm really proud of! I did a lengthy interview one of my favorite remix engineers, the legendary John Luongo (an extra excerpt from that interview was published here as a piece if you subscribe to this newsletter), and I also spoke to another great remixer, Arthur Baker, on his work on the singles of Bruce Springsteen's Born in the U.S.A., which turned 40 this summer. I also did a hybrid review-interview of Disney's recent vinyl box set for Mary Poppins, which added some lovely color commentary by one of my music business heroes, Walt Disney Records producer/historian Randy Thornton.

It's morbid to note, but TSD traffic spikes considerably when notable musical figures pass away. My TSD partner Joe Marchese and I pride ourselves on the often personal eulogies we put together in response. We both had a lot to say about the passing of Poppins songwriter Richard M. Sherman, and I was compelled to share an anecdote about Douglass Fake, the founder of film score reissue label Intrada Records, upon his passing this past summer.

Finally, as my connection to "working in the music industry" gets more and more tenuous, it felt really good to ask "What's going on with the Prince estate?" a few months before The New York Times outlined just how bad it might be.

Allmusic Aplenty

One of my coolest freelance gigs is regular contributions to Allmusic. When I was first using the Internet, somewhere after the official Nintendo page, Allmusic was the next website I pored over—a key destination for my immersion into pop music history and criticism. So it's an honor to be part of that site in some way, and not an insubstantial way either: as of this week, I've written just over 200 bios for them. Listing them all would be insane, but I can walk you through 30 of my favorites, in alphabetical order:

• Maggie Antone: One of the more unique cover acts I've heard in the country genre—who else would tackle John Denver and Blink-182 with equal aplomb?
• Willow Avalon: For as influential as they are, I don't know that we hear a lot of Fleetwood Mac-esque acts. She's a bit of an exception.
• Been Stellar: What could read like a third-generation New York City punk piss-take actually crackles with energy that kept me interested.
• Big Hit: This was a really interesting story to learn about: the father of "Sicko Mode" producer Hit-Boy is getting his hip-hop career off the ground after a lot of derailments.
• Coco & Breezy: A pretty good R&B duo who transitioned to music from fashion, having designed the custom sunglasses that Prince wore in the last years of his career.
• Cyril: You had me at "Aussie deep house cover of Crowded House's 'Fall At Your Feet.'"
• Dhruv: A kind of Tik Tok-core R&B, I guess—I don't really indulge in the app—but I can feel the heart pulsing through his work.
• Ekko Astral: It was an honor to do the bio for one of the best reviewed acts of the year!
• Elliott Fullam: These are painfully intimate folk songs, which I would not have expected from that one kid in Terrifier 2 and 3.
• Glass Beams: I dig what this trio is doing—instrumental surf psychedelia, basically—and love that only one of the three members is publicly known.
• Brody Grant: Stay gold, Ponyboy in The Outsiders musical on Broadway!
• Ìxtahuele: Maybe my favorite story of all the bios I've written. Four white guys from Sweden do a bunch of albums of "exotica" (the mid-'60s instrumental subgenre of easy listening that sounds like island music) and get tapped out of nowhere to record a bunch of unheard songs by the guy who wrote "Nature Boy."
• Karate Boogaloo: I don't know that the world needs more deceptively funky white boys (there might be too many), but I'm always delightfully surprised when some cross my path.
• Caroline Kingsbury: My kind of synth-soaked sapphic-leaning pop (think MUNA or Chappell Roan), and an act I can't wait to see open for another act I love (Pom Pom Squad) in 2025.
• Wyatt C. Louis: Really entranced by Louis' lived-in folk, which shines with a respect for their native heritage.
• Mavi: Just reading about this rapper/neuroscience student/Earl Sweatshirt collaborator made me feel smarter.
• Moody Joody: "Ground Control" is going to get stuck in your head.
• Morbid Saint: Essentially one of the first thrash metal bands but didn't get their due until decades later. We love a good comeback story, folks!
• Mourning Noise: What are the odds that two bands that sound like this come from the same New Jersey town at the same time? (The other band is the Misfits.)
• Nemahsis: Vital, vivacious pop with an eye and ear toward Palestine and its people.
• Ratbag: An appealing creative vision: picture an Antipodean Billie Eilish fronting Gorillaz.
• The Red Pears: Hardly another band from East L.A.—lo-fi rock with character.
• Santa Chiara: Imagine if Courtney Barnett was Italian and wrote songs about coming to America to live with her musician husband.
• Sign Crushes Motorist: Tik Tok gives us so many weird stories like this one (Irish kid likes Duster so much he makes music that pays homage to their aesthetic; the results both put Duster on the radar of people who'd have no idea who they are and also vastly exceeds that band's popularity).
• Tasha: I was really struck by Tasha's intimacy in song—check out "Perfect Wife" and hear what I'm talking about—and I also love her presence within the context of someone else's work, in this case the musical adaptation of Sufjan Stevens' Illinoise. That's an intriguing way to work.
• Tiny Habits: Anyone championed by David Crosby and produced by Tony Berg is going to be on my radar in a good way.
• Vienna Vienna: "Vienna (Everything's Fine)"—what a chorus! I love when acts come up with an aesthetic like "glimmer rock" and hope I did justice describing it.
• Mato Wayuhi: The most rewarding bios have an easy hook to them, and "wrote the music for Reservation Dogs" was a pretty good starting point.
• The Wilder Blue: These guys really kicked my ass with their music. I don't write a note of music, but "Dixie Darlin'" made me wish I did.
• Zolita: Good pop and better videos. Like, nobody has any excuse to make mediocre videos after watching what she can do with clips like this.

Also, I got to contribute to a few features for the site, sharing my favorite various-artists soundtrack from the '90s and an album I thought was scary for Halloween. (Both answers are extremely on brand.)

Observer

I've been contributing features to Observer for awhile, usually some sort of thematic playlist or commemoration when a musician is in the news or dead (or in the news because they're dead). This year, I made a Valentine's Day mixtape from semi-obscure soundtrack songs, traced Amy Winehouse's influences ahead of the biopic made about her, wrote about the best posthumous Prince projects (proud to say I got this assignment off that Second Disc op-ed from the last paragraph), and eulogized both James Earl Jones and Quincy Jones for their immeasurable works.

Ultimate Classic Rock

I don't write for UCR as often as I'd like, because I think they have not a lot of freelancer budget. But I did turn in a few fun things for them. Because I'm me, I ranked every Ghostbusters movie, including the new one that came out this year. (I remember it mainly for two reasons: I went to see that new one after visiting my youngest daughter in the hospital, and I got to keep my promise of "the only way I'll probably see this while parenting one newborn at home and another in the NICU is if someone pays me.") When the hype cycle for Beetlejuice Beetlejuice started to fire up, I read the insane early '90s draft for the never-made sequel Beetlejuice Goes Hawaiian and wrote an assessment. As Willie Nelson kept on releasing new music, I shared some of his best team-ups with and covers of classic rockers, and I also commemorated the end of Billy Joel's Madison Square Garden residency with a ranking of his many, many live albums.

Various One-Offs

I got my byline in a few new places this year, which was pretty cool! For Universal Music's catalogue editorial site uDiscover Music, I penned a fun condensed history of movie soundtracks on the Motown Records label. And for the film zine Wig-Wag, I wrote a really heartfelt personal essay about E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial and all the times of year it represents in my mind. (My wife says it's one of her favorite works of mine; take that for what it's worth to you.) I also, for the first time ever, was used as a source on someone else's story: writer Zach Schonfeld, whose work I just adore, quoted me in a piece for Inverse about Hollywood's attempts at making some extra dollars through publishing.

Liner Notes

I love writing liner notes and it's probably the sort of thing I wish I was doing more. (At least two more opportunities to do so—one of which I was actively working on—did not work out this year. C'est la vie.) I wrote another set of liner notes for my friend Julian Velard's latest album In the Middle of Something, a short and sweet song cycle about middle age that ranks as one of my favorite albums of the year. (We'll get into that in a later post, though.) I also wrote a cool, old-school jacket note for a set from Verve Records that put Ella Fitzgerald Wishes You a Swingin' Christmas and Louis Armstrong Wishes You a Cool Yule in the same package. This is notable as the only work of mine you could conceivably read in a record store. (Are any stores stocking this one? Do any record stores still exist where you are?)

Listen to These

I love going on podcasts. Can I be on your podcast? This year, I was on two: The Record Player, where I discussed Tears for Fears' The Seeds of Love with longtime friends Jeff Giles and Matt Wardlaw (I have no doubt it's good, but I have nearly no memory of recording it, so close did it come to the girls being born); and the Sleepless Cinematic Podcast, where I spoke eloquently(ish) for something like two hours about E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (whaaaaat??). Another fun fact about this one: my pal Emilio Tostado, who co-hosts the show, was the last person I e-mailed before becoming a parent...because I had to postpone our initial recording schedule when my daughters arrived a few days earlier than planned.

One Last Thing

I'm really proud of this ad I wrote. It's a nice reminder that these things don't have to be big—they just have to be fun. Here's to more fun writing in 2025. Thanks for reading.