Christian Hoard Interview
Christian Hoard is music editor at Rolling Stone. He’s been involved with the magazine in one way or another for nearly two decades now, and overseeing the music department for the last five. He got his start writing about music at his college newspaper, the Michigan Daily, and then went from an internship at The Village Voice to writing at Rolling Stone. As he puts it, “for the son of a truck driver from Michigan, all of this has been pretty exciting.”
How did you get to where you are today, professionally?
I was an English major loosely planning to become an academic or a lawyer. But I also wanted to write. Late in college, 1999 I think, I started reviewing records and doing interviews for the school paper, the Michigan Daily. By that point I was a pretty obsessive music fan; I spent a lot of time and what disposable income I had at Ann Arbor’s many used record stores. Around then I started reading a lot of rock criticism, first to figure out what I should listen to and then because it was eye-opening to see people do it so well. Robert Christgau’s Consumer Guides were very influential, as were Greil Marcus’s books. Rob Sheffield in Rolling Stone, Greg Tate, Ann Powers, Ellen Willis: all big for me. I read everything in the Village Voice’s music section back then.
Not quite knowing what to do after college, I did in fact apply to law schools and grad programs, and eventually decided to go to grad school at Columbia for ethnomusicology, which was partly an excuse to move to New York and see if I could write. Before leaving Michigan I applied to an internship at the Voice, and a few weeks after 9/11, Chuck Eddy, who was then the music editor, called to offer me the gig. It was a lively, old-school place; they had a smoking lounge. Christgau, Michael Musto, Richard Goldstein, and J. Hoberman were around. Nat Hentoff was friendly and had a cluttered office. They let me write record reviews even though I didn’t quite know what I was doing.