Andrew Sacher Interview (Senior Editor, BrooklynVegan)
Andrew Sacher is Senior Editor at BrooklynVegan. He’s been working for the site for more than a decade now, and in that time he’s championed countless bands that don’t make the critical radar of sites of similar stature. Recently, he did an overview of the ska scene—an article published months before the recent spate of interest in the genre.
How did you get to where you are today, professionally?
From a very early age, music just resonated with me more than anything. Even when I was just a young kid listening to pop music on the radio or overhearing my parents’ classic rock records, I remember just feeling like it was a very important part of my life, not just something to hum along to. Eventually bands like blink-182 and Green Day turned me on to punk, and from there I just dove headfirst into so many bands in that realm, and I wanted to know EVERYTHING about them. I wanted to read books on them, watch documentaries, listen to the bands that influenced them, then listen to the bands that influenced their influences, etc, etc.
I was also getting heavily involved in my local music scene, and I knew that I wanted music to not just be my obsession, but be my career. I ended up going to Purchase College and majoring in arts management, which was a pretty unique and open-ended major; I didn’t really need to chose yet what I was going to do in the arts world, I was just learning about it from several angles and trying to figure out where I could fit in. I was simultaneously minoring in literature, because I loved to read and write and I felt like I needed to explore that side of me too and not get totally tunnel-visioned into the music industry side of things. I had never really had any idea I’d end up in journalism, but in hindsight it makes total sense: I loved music, and I loved writing, and now I get to spend every day of my life doing both!
So, while in college, I ended up applying to BrooklynVegan as a part time thing, and it just clicked really quickly. Dave, who founded and runs the site, has been hugely supportive since day one. He’s always been really open to ideas that I’ve had about article topics or artists to cover, and has continued to challenge and encourage me along the way. In my first two years at BV, I went from writing up basic news announcements to writing my first longform thinkpiece. In 2016, I launched my first column for the site (Notable Releases of the Week, where I write short reviews of a handful of new albums each week), and in early 2020, I launched my second column (In Defense of the Genre, where I write about music from all across the punk spectrum, including and often especially the bands and subgenres that historically haven’t been taken as seriously). This year, I began hosting a livestream show for BV and sorta taking a lot of what I’ve done in the past and doing it on camera in conversation form. I’m in my 11th year at BV at this point, and it’s a total blessing that I’ve had the opportunity to keep pushing myself to do more and more with music journalism at every turn.
Did you have any mentors along the way? What did they teach you?
Touched on this in the last question too but definitely Dave from BV. There is no possible way that I would be the writer I am today without his influence, support, and the way that he challenges me as an editor. Also have to give a shoutout to Kathy McCormick at Purchase College (who actually just retired this year), the most brutal editor I’ve ever encountered. Writing for her was no walk in the park, but she made me a better writer—and a better editor—in a matter of weeks.
Walk me through a typical day-to-day for you right now.
My work day consists of being glued to my laptop from about 8 AM to 6 PM every week day, trying my best to navigate a workload of news, album reviews, interviews, longform pieces, editing, emailing, social media, and probably more that I’m forgetting at the moment, while also trying to listen to as many new songs, albums, artists, etc as I can. I think anyone who works in news is sort of “on call” (so to speak) 24/7, and that is definitely the case for me. I also think, when your hobby and your career overlap this much, that you often end up “working” by accident even in your free time. I am constantly on the hunt for music I haven’t heard yet, constantly reading other writers’ work, and just always kind of thinking—either consciously or subconsciously—about the next project I’m going to take on.
What does your media diet look like?
I follow a bunch of other writers on Twitter who cover music I like, both because I love reading their takes and also because they often turn me on to stuff I hadn’t heard yet. Lately, that includes Ian Cohen, Dan Ozzi, Ellie Kovach, Arielle Gordon, Tom Breihan, Chris DeVille, Danielle Chelosky, Miranda Reinert, Eli Enis, Craig Jenkins, Leor Galil, David Anthony, Zoe Camp, Nina Corcoran, and I am sure I am regrettably forgetting some others. I also in general love reading Stereogum, The Alternative, Idioteq, Punknews, along with tons of other sites, and also just scrolling through Twitter and finding cool articles that way. I try my best to maintain a balance between reading other people’s pieces and writing my own… sometimes easier said than done.
What would you like to see more of in music journalism right now?
I’d like to see more space in mainstream music journalism for stuff that falls a little bit more on the fringes of the zeitgeist. I think individual writers’ newsletters are of course making up for this a bit, but I’d really like to see it in major publications. Like, just for example, I’ve spent a lot of my career writing about the “emo revival”—and a lot of those writers I just named have as well—and it often feels like writers who cover this stuff are constantly in defense mode, myself included.
I wish it wasn’t such an uphill battle to talk about this type of music compared to the type of indie rock that gets consensus critical acclaim, especially when the music itself isn’t all that different. And the big disconnect for me, is that so many of the bands who seem to be perceived as less worthy of critical acclaim, are really important to young music fans.
In 2021 so far alone, we’ve seen some big 10th anniversary pieces go up for debut albums by Joyce Manor, Title Fight, and Balance and Composure, and what’s really clear to me, is that people are REALLY reacting positively to these pieces. These are classic albums to a generation of music fans in their early 20s right now, and these albums got basically no press when they came out, outside of punk-specific websites.
In 2021, those albums seem a lot more important than a lot of the stuff that had consensus critical acclaim in 2011. Are we going to keep repeating this cycle, where albums from supposedly niche communities like emo are not taken seriously until they’re re-evaluated as classics? Or are we going to recognize this pattern and make more space for this kind of stuff in real time? I really would like the answer to be the latter.
And this of course goes beyond emo. Like look at what’s going in with ska right now. In just a few weeks in late April and early May, a bunch of articles popped up across major music publications that take the current generation of ska bands very seriously. That’s amazing, I was genuinely so excited to see that. I just hope it isn’t just this one surge of attention on the genre and then back to the fringes. And it goes beyond punk. Jam band culture is another culture that’s full of diehard music fans and sort of only taken seriously by music publications that are dedicated to jam band culture.
Alexander Rudenshiold from the band Infant Island wrote a great piece last year about how metal and heavy music was ignored on almost every single major music publication’s year-end list. Why is that? Metal is so beloved by so many people, it’s obviously on major publications’ radars, and, on rare occasions, metal bands have broken through into the world of mainstream music journalism. Deafheaven are of course a big example of a metal band who have gotten universal critical acclaim outside of metal journalism, and I love that band, but for every Deafheaven, there are hundreds of other metal bands making music that’s equally or more interesting, and largely getting ignored.
I understand the reality that, with staffs made up of several music writers and so much music happening at once, the focus will often end up being on the artists who have the most amount of supporters across the board. But every time year-end list season rolls around, you can predict about 30-40 albums that are gonna end up on every major top 50 before the lists even get published. I think it’d be interesting if that wasn’t the case.
What would you like to see less of in music journalism right now?
This kind of goes hand in hand with my answer to the last question, but, the idea that one type of artist is worth acknowledging and one isn’t. This is really one of the big things I was reacting to with my In Defense of the Genre column. I don’t expect any person or publication to pretend to like something that they don’t like, but I’d rather read a well-educated take on why a beloved album is terrible, than watch music publications choose to not even interact with it at all.
Here’s one example: last year brought new albums by Anti-Flag, Strike Anywhere, and The Suicide Machines, all of which are long-running, beloved, fairly popular, and fiercely political punk bands. I thought those were fantastic albums, and they really hit hard in a year full of social and political unrest. They got reviews on a few niche punk websites, and that’s about it. Compare that to like, the new Weezer album. Weezer’s been around for roughly the same amount of time as those bands, and like most newer Weezer albums, the new one’s gotten mostly lukewarm and negative reviews, but those reviews came from the biggest music publications in the world. I think Weezer deserve album reviews, but why does there seem to be an entry barrier for one group of bands and not another?
What’s one tip that you’d give a music journalist starting out right now?
Just be true to yourself. Stick to what you believe in, even if you’re met with resistance, and I think that will pay off in the end.
What artist or trend are you most interested in right now?
Ska! Everything going on with ska right now, musically and culturally, is such a huge inspiration to me. Not only is this new generation of bands incredible, but the ethos, the messages, and the sense of community is so inspirational. The new generation of bands is really in touch with the DIY roots that ska had before the American ska boom of the mid ’90s, and they’re also very in touch with the politics and anti-racism of the UK’s 2 Tone ska movement, but they take it much further than that. There’s a growing queer presence in the current ska scene, a lot of bands with women, trans, and non-binary members, and the scene is filled with—to quote Mike Sosinski from Bad Time Records and Kill Lincoln—“acceptance of everything but hate.”
Last year, Bad Time Records, Asian Man Records, and Ska Punk Daily put out the absolutely essential Ska Against Racism compilation (named after Asian Man founder Mike Park’s 1998 tour of the same name) and donated the money to several incredible anti-racist causes. But ska today is not just against racism, it’s also loudly against homophobia, transphobia, sexism, any and all bigotry. The Ska Against Racism comp—which has a mix of bands who played the original Ska Against Racism tour, other third wave bands, and a slew of modern bands—is also a very good introduction to the current generation of ska bands.
Beyond that, Jer Hunter—who does Skatune Network, has a solo project called JER, and plays in We Are The Union—has dedicated their life to promoting great ska bands, educating people on ska’s past, present, and future, and flipping the stigma on ska. If you aren’t following Jer (@skatunenetwork) on Twitter or TikTok or watching their YouTube videos, change that now.
Bad Time Records is killing it for ska right now; the label was founded in 2018 and every single thing they’ve released is worth hearing. Huge shoutout to Jeff Rosenstock, who played in two of the best ska-punk bands of all time (Arrogant Sons of Bitches and Bomb the Music Industry!) before finally getting long-overdue critical acclaim as a solo artist and now using his platform to help turn people on to ska’s new generation. If you aren’t already, listen to We Are The Union, Kill Lincoln, Catbite, JER, Joystick, The Best of the Worst, Omnigone, Flying Raccoon Suit, Bad Operation, Tape Girl, Stuck Lucky, Still Alive, Los Skagaleros, Call Me Malcolm, The Holophonics, Matamoska, Poindexter, Bruce Lee Band, Abraskadabra, The Skints, Bite Me Bambi, Hey-Smith, Free Kick, SMN, Faintest Idea, The Bar Stool Preachers… the list goes on.
What’s your favorite part of all this?
Finding a piece of music that changes my life and getting to share it with the world.
What was the best track / video or film / book you’ve consumed in the past 12 months?
Can I pick a full album? For Your Health - In Spite Of. (If it has to be one song, “I Slept with Wes Eisold and All I Got Was an Out of Court Settlement.”) This band taps into a slew of different post-hardcore styles from the early/mid 2000s (anything from The Locust and Daughters to Fear Before the March of Flames and The Fall of Troy to Thursday, and even that list doesn’t do it justice), and they make it entirely their own. The influence of that era is obvious but it feels like an entirely new thing. In a just world, For Your Health would be headlining stadiums.
If you had to point folks to one piece of yours, what would it be and why?
I’ll go with the article I did on the current ska scene. I did extensive interviews with Jer Hunter, Mike Sosinski, and Mike Park for this, as well as shorter interviews with a handful of other current ska bands, which really marked the most ambitious undertaking I’ve embarked on for one individual article so far. When I first pitched the piece to Dave at BV, I was very curious about what was going on in ska currently, but after speaking directly with these massively inspirational people, I really had such a better sense of why what they’re all doing is so unique and special. I really hope I was able to get that across in the piece, and I hope that—even if you don’t like listening to ska—that you would at least read that article and walk away with respect for the genre.