T.M. Brown Interview
I’m Todd L. Burns, and welcome to Music Journalism Insider, a newsletter about music journalism. Click here to subscribe!
T.M. Brown is a freelancer with bylines in the New Yorker, New York Times, and much more. His day job is VP of Creative at Codeword, a communications and marketing agency.
How did you get to where you are today, professionally?
I had a really roundabout path to all of this. I started as a city planner working for the Feds and NYCDOT. I loved it. Something about how these massive interlocking systems worked was always fascinating to me, as was anything you only noticed or appreciated when it broke (like the subway.) In 2015, I ended up winning a research fellowship to go study high-speed rail in Berlin—but ended up spending most of my time in clubs. (The German word for “high-speed rail” is “hochgeschwindigkeitsbahn.”) I wrote a couple of gratis pieces for Drew Millard at Noisey while I was there, and those were probably my first bylines that meant anything.