Mike Huguenor is a musician, writer, and the former arts editor of Metro Silicon Valley. Mike just left his job at Metro and is now working on a biography of Asian Man Records, in addition to touring across the United States.
How did you get to where you are today, professionally?
Long before I was writing about music, I was playing it. My bands Shinobu and Hard Girls were active in the San Jose area through the 2000s and 2010s and regularly left on lengthy tours where few people saw us. These days I have a variety of musical projects I play in, but am most active as the guitarist for Jeff Rosenstock.
However, my whole life, I've also been interested in writing, primarily fiction. For years, I was trying to write novels but couldn't figure out what to do once I'd finished a first draft. By then, I'd have another idea I liked more and would want to devote all my thought to that, nothing would get into a proper finished state, and the cycle would continue. So, sometime around 2015, I decided that instead of devoting hours to writing about something that didn't exist and may never get published, I should try to write something that might get published. I began looking into these things called "articles" and "magazines," most of which I'd never bothered to read at all because I was always reading like Machado de Assis and Jean Genet and people like that instead.