Wayne's Words

Why am I here? Not in the existential sense, but in the blogging sense. For many years I was a full-time rock and pop critic (everything from the Sex Pistols to Sinatra and beyond) for a large daily newspaper. In the mid-1990's, I stared into the abyss and decided I didn't want to be a 50 year old rock critic. I became a food writer, got a mid-career fellowship to NYU's Graduate School, where I taught criticism for a few semesters and got my M.A. 27 years after receiving my B.A. out in Boulder. I picked a good time to drop music as a full-time job, since my life would've consisted on deciphering the meaning of Britney, pontificating on the long-term potential of the Backstreet Boys, defending Eminem and having to pay close attention to the individual and collective works of members of the Wu Tang Clan. I decided to just write about stuff that I loved: I did a reissues column for the now-defunct Blues Access, and now write regularly for the Boston Phoenix music section even though I don't live in New England. In doing a story about blogs in my current job as an associate editor for a trade magazine in which my beat is covering the online newspaper industry, I thought a blog in which I could write critically but informally about music, food, media, arts and culture might be an interesting experiment in the creative process. So here we are.