Martin Douglas Interview (KEXP)
Martin Douglas is a digital content producer for the website of KEXP, Seattle’s excellent radio station. In more than a decade of writing about music, he’s had bylines in Bandcamp Daily, Pitchfork, and Passion of the Weiss. (He also writes extensively about wrestling for Fanbyte.)
How did you get to where you are today, professionally?
Back in 2005 when it seemed like every obsessive music fan had a Blogger site, I started my first music blog. It was called The Armchair Novelist just because I thought that particular combination of words sounded cool. As a community college dropout, my education in criticism and journalism came from devouring music magazines since childhood. I can barely remember what it was like; I wrote a Late Registration review, a very early, very rough rendition of what would become “The Only Black Guy at the Indie Rock Show,” and a year-end list like everybody else. I was just starting to make my own music and partly used criticism to figure out what I liked about music.
By 2009, I was recording a lot and putting music up on the website for my lo-fi, experimental singer/songwriter project, called Fresh Cherries from Yakima. (Like many people who title things, I’m a fan of the catchy-sounding non-sequitur.) I also moved my music blog there and would write about music whenever I felt about it, which ended up being multiple times a week. My friend Jeff Weiss—we were admirers of each other’s writing and first hung out in person at PopCon back when it was still called the EMP Conference—started to have mutual friends of ours write for his blog and I wanted to get in on that action. I contributed to the site’s year-end list in 2008, which in my eyes was its turning point in terms of being the incubator for talent it has become.