Corrigan Blanchfield Interview

Corrigan Blanchfield has freelanced for Tone Glow and Passion of the Weiss, among other publications, but these days he identifies himself as a blogger. He recently relaunched his website, “providing myself a venue for links and posts of any shape,” he writes, “while staying un-beholden to any particular platform or the perverse incentives thereof.”

How did you get to where you are today, professionally?

It’d be a stretch to say that I’m anywhere at all professionally, at least in terms of music, but my big foundational thing was discovering that mere adjacency to college radio–and a little bit of lying–was enough to finesse a press pass to most any music festival in my area. I don’t think this is a really effective grift anymore (a lot of the most reliable options seem to have gone bankrupt, probably due to unsustainable credentialing practices), but happy to elaborate via follow-up email should anyone reading this want to give it a try.

Anyway, I started feeling guilty almost immediately and decided I’d try and do at least a little bit of press-like activity by way of hitting up artists for interviews. Having nowhere in particular to publish the interviews afterwards actually didn’t seem to be a huge obstacle. I thought for a minute that I’d do the freelance thing, but editors really don’t care for the Q&A format (it makes it a bit too obvious that the artist, not the writer, is the interesting person in the conversation, I think), and my criticism or whatever didn’t get a lot of traction.