Todd Hoover Interview
Todd Hoover is the self-described "CEO, PR representative, and coffee-fetching underling of Todd’s Top Tens." Those top tens began life on Facebook, but have more recently found a home on Instagram and TikTok. Todd's reviews have a distinctive style, always starting out with the line, "Listening to X's album is like..." It provides a neat pathway into what Todd calls album descriptions. ("I honestly consider myself more of a historian than a journalist, per se.")
How did you get to where you are today, professionally?
I started writing album reviews in high school, and even got a few published in my home state’s most popular newspaper. This is part of what inspired me to pursue a bachelor’s degree in journalism; while attaining said degree, I kept writing and publishing album lists and reviews. Shortly after I graduated, I somehow settled on a job reporting on local news that had little, if anything, to do with music. Fast forward through several disillusionments, a master’s degree in worship and music ministry (long story for another time), and several career changes: I am completing my 10th year as a full-time music teacher.
Throughout all of this, I never stopped researching and writing about music. I coined the name “Todd’s Top Tens” for a Facebook page where I started posting such writings back circa 2018. These writings soon transitioned to Instagram, where I slowly but surely developed my distinctive “listening to this album is like” review style. I posted daily album reviews throughout the quarantine, and started acting some of them out on TikTok nearly one year ago … completely unaware that doing so would ultimately result in nearly 18,000 followers on that app.