Interview With Music Journalism Insider
While promoting my book, I was interviewed by the industry newsletter, Music Journalism Insider, run by Todd L. Burns. While you can find the original article here, it is located behind the site’s paywall. I’ve reposted the interview below with Todd’s permission.
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Ryan Pinkard is the author of a new 33 1/3 book on The National’s Boxer. The album turned 15 yesterday, so Ryan felt like it was an opportune time to reflect on its making. Ryan is a writer, editor, and record collector, with previous stints at TIDAL and TuneIn. He’s currently working on editing Bloomsbury’s new series on genres, which kicks off in October.
How did you get to where you are today, professionally?
Long before I knew what I wanted to be when I grew up, I was always really into music. By the time I discovered indie rock in high school, it became my entire identity. Looking back, it was probably my near-religious habit of reading Rolling Stone and Pitchfork that planted the seeds for my future career writing about music.
While earning my Journalism degree at the University of Colorado, I completed multiple unpaid internships at various publications, but with print media imploding in front of my eyes, I had some reasonable doubts that I would ever find a real job as a journalist.
My lucky break came in 2014 when I decided to move to Denmark, of all places. An old friend was working for a small Norwegian streaming service called WiMP that was planning to rebrand as a global competitor to Spotify. I was hired as their first U.S. Editor, and we launched TIDAL that November. Six months later we were bought by Jay-Z.
After three incredible but exhausting years at TIDAL, I was completely burned out. I got a comparatively chill copywriting job at the radio and podcast app TuneIn. While copywriting isn’t as fulfilling as editorial work is, it paid the bills and allowed me and my pal Anthony Valadez (current co-host of KCRW’s Morning Becomes Eclectic) to create a four-part podcast series called Place in Sound.
Finally, in the first year of the pandemic I decided to submit a proposal for the 33 ⅓ series, which is how I came to write my debut book, Boxer, now available at a bookshop or record store near you.
Can you please briefly describe the book?
Held together by the simple concept—a book about an album—each entry in the 33 ⅓ series takes a unique approach to its subject. Based on 30+ hours of interviews with over 20 individuals, mine is an oral history that tells the story of The National’s 2007 album Boxer, revealing how the band operates, and how their early trials and tribulations culminated in their breakthrough record.
How did you come to this subject for a book? What made the topic so interesting to you?
I’ve been a huge fan of The National since seeing them open for R.E.M. and Modest Mouse in 2008, and since then they’ve repeatedly amazed me as one of the most hardworking and consistent bands of their time. I felt they deserved a book more than most acts on the scene, and thanks to my old job at TIDAL I had a relationship with the band’s manager, I thought I had a good shot at getting the band members to talk to me. While I did consider writing about another album in their discography, Boxer has always been my favorite, and the more I researched, the more certain I was that it had the most interesting story to tell.
Tell me a bit about the process of securing the book deal.
In the case of 33 ⅓, the process is fairly straightforward. Every year or so Bloomsbury, which publishes the series, holds an open call for proposals. In that period you put together a detailed sales pitch of the book, which includes outlines, descriptions, writing samples, and a marketing plan. Out of around 450 submissions, mine and a dozen others were chosen as the next titles in the series. I suspect that having a written commitment of the band’s participation helped push mine over the finish line.
What did the research process look like?
The beating heart of my book is the original interviews with the band and others involved, which took a huge amount of time to arrange, conduct, transcribe, and then make sense of. What I didn’t foresee was the extensive detective work that I had to do outside of that. In order to tell this history of events that occurred 15 to 20 years ago, I had to scour deep into the archives of the web, uncovering old blog posts, reviews, and defunct websites that hadn’t been read in a decade. The Wayback Machine was a godsend for these purposes.
The band also granted me access to old demo recordings, which helped show how the album came together, as well as photos, some of which I was able to include in the book.
How did you go about writing the actual book?
It all started with the interviews. Once I had a good number of those, I began the tedious process of going through the transcripts and cherry picking the quotes and facts that I found potentially useful, which I then organized in a way that created a narrative arc. As my chapters started to come together, I was able to add my own narration, and identify holes that I needed to fill with follow-up interviews and research, constantly refining along the way. I would liken this process to putting together a 5,000 piece puzzle, except the pieces have been mixed with boxes of other puzzles.
What was the easiest and hardest thing about the whole project?
Conducting the interviews was the easy part, and I’m still in awe of how generous everyone was with their time and memories. The hard part was processing the interviews, carefully picking out all the usable parts in the way you would with a buffalo carcass, as the saying goes.
What are a few tracks / videos / films / books we should also look at, in addition to your book, to get a better sense of the topic?
Lizzy Goodman’s highly-acclaimed indie rock history, Meet Me in the Bathroom (2017), was absolutely essential for me, both in terms of setting a backdrop for the scene The National emerged from, and for partially inspiring the heavily quote-based format of my book. Lizzy was also kind enough to let me interview her for my book.
Did you have any mentors along the way? What did they teach you?
While I can’t point to a particular mentor with the book, this experience certainly reconfirmed the fact that the folks you meet and the projects you work on end up informing what you do after. I can’t imagine writing this book without the people, the experiences, the rejections, and the skills I unknowingly acquired before I began.
What’s one tip that you’d give someone looking to write a music book right now?
It’s competitive out there, but good ideas and good writing tend to float to the top with enough persistence. A bit of clever salesmanship goes a long way too.
What’s next for you?
I have a few things cooking on the creative front, including some articles, a podcast, and some new book ideas. I’ve also been editing manuscripts for the new 33 ⅓ spinoff series called Genre, which is exactly what it sounds like. The first one, Death Metal by Tom Coles, comes out this October. Also, if you’re in need of a freelance writer, editor, scriptwriter, or podcast producer, I’m available.
