Welcome to stübermania
A new newsletter featuring shit from an old dictaphone
My name is Stuart Berman, this is my newsletter, and these are my reasons for starting it:
1. I’ve always wanted to say the words “smash that subscribe button” with a straight face.
2. This year will mark 30 years since I made my first attempt at typing out words about music for public consumption. (My inaugural assignment was two record reviews for the University of Toronto’s Varsity newspaper: the Pulp Fiction soundtrack, and Slayer’s Divine Intervention—both on cassette.) Over the past three decades, I’ve conducted hundreds of musician interviews, the recordings of which have been precariously preservered on dusty old cassettes languishing in a box that I’ve schlepped through multiple house moves over the years, with no real sense of what I would ever do with them. I considered adapting the tapes into a podcast, but 99 per cent of the recordings sound like shit, and hearing 22-year-old me stumble and mumble my way through an interview is the audio equivalent of staring at an awkward high-school yearbook photo, if that photo was projected across the entirety of the Las Vegas Sphere. So I decided to go the newsletter route instead: each week, stübermania will feature a complete transcript of a conversation I had back in the ‘90s and 2000s with a notable alt/indie/rock semi-star, complemented by my current observations on how the interview went, and what I maybe shoulda-woulda-coulda done better. I like to think of this newsletter as my 30th-anniversary box set of greatest hits, complete with updated liner notes.
3. Most of these interviews were adapted into articles for publications that are no longer around in print or online form, including Eye Weekly (the alt-weekly where I served as music editor for seven years), Chart magazine (kinda like Canada’s version of SPIN, if SPIN paid $20 for a 3,000-word cover story), and CMJ New Music Monthly, among others. In fact, the entire late-’90s/early-2000s era is kind of a digital black hole as far as music journalism is concerned, so I hope this newsletter can serve as a modest act of cultural preservation.
4. If you’re a music writer in the year 2024, and you don’t have a newsletter, do you really exist?
Starting June 20, stübermania will hit your inbox every Thursday. (After all these years, my internal clock is still set to alt-weekly time.) In addition to the main interview, each newsletter will feature an opening act of sorts—i.e., a brief introductory section featuring links to my current writing, other clickable curiosities, and notes on the latest updates to my ever-evolving Best of 2024 playlist. (Think of it as that part of Marc Maron’s podcast where he rambles on for 10 minutes at the beginning and after a while you’re just like, “dude, get to the fucking interview already.”)
We’ll kick-off next Thursday with my 2002 conversation with Paul Westerberg. Can’t hardly wait.
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