Two-Way Static

The Road Now Goes Both Ways

I’m a hypocrite. Today I start changing that.

One of the main currents running through this website is transmission — the idea that music works best when it moves hand to hand. A mixtape sent in the mail. A “you’ve got to hear this” leaned across a bar. The direct transfer of one person’s obsession into another person’s ears.

I’ve spent months arguing that the obsessive, dedicated fan is the engine that keeps music alive, the node that matters more than any algorithm ever could. And the whole time, I’ve only ever been a node in one direction — receiving, never transmitting outward to the artists themselves. I’ve curated myself into a small, closed ecosystem. Not as myopic as it could be, but nowhere near as large as it should be, with my own curiosity as the only thing driving expansion. That’s the antithesis of everything I write about.

My father is where it started. Five kids, a house that ran on Saturday morning cleaning to whatever was on the turntable, and the occasional “Hey Ben, come hear this” that felt like an interruption at the time and feels like inheritance now. Somewhere in there he didn’t just hand me songs — he opened a pathway, built guardrails around it that kept me from bailing on something difficult before it had the chance to land. I still run by a four-listen rule because of him. Stevie Wonder’s Innervisions took me all four.

That inheritance became its own transmission line. Patrick and I talk music every Saturday morning before our households wake up — eleven months apart, close enough in age that we’re tuned to the same frequency, far enough apart to still surprise each other. My son Kerouac and I run a private Discord that’s mostly just YouTube links thrown back and forth. He’s the one who put me onto Sturgill Simpson, deep in his own Americana rabbit hole long before I caught up.

All of that is real, and all of it is good. It’s also a closed loop. I built a small, comfortable circuit and called it a relationship with music, while telling everyone else their circuit needed to be bigger.

That has to change.

I believe in walking your talk, so here’s me pulling my boots on. If music is going to survive the algorithmic playlist and the anytime-anywhere consumption we’ve all quietly agreed to, it needs human transmission lines running in both directions — not just fans discovering artists, but someone willing to say you’ve got to hear this about the artist nobody’s discovered yet. I want to be that node. Diminished, maybe, in an industry built to route around people like me but real, and getting stronger as more of us remember what we gave up when we let Spotify do our listening for us.

If you’re an emerging artist, I want to hear you. I want to write about you. I want to help you reach whatever you’re building toward, with whatever reach this small platform actually has. Send me your work — the how is in my Submissions and Editorial Policy. I won’t promise to cover everything that comes my way. We won’t always be a match. But I will never be cruel about it.

The digital age handed us infinite choice and called it progress. One transmission at a time, let’s take back the thing we used to do without even thinking about it.