(This story originally appeared in the March 2020 edition of New Jersey Monthly).
Nothing fancy here, just a Q&A with a writer whose work I really enjoy. Harlan Coben’s books aren’t going to win any Pulitzers, but they’re fun and propulsive, and the guy pumps them out with machine-like precision. They’re also really consistent — it’s some kind of amazing that Coben hasn’t run out of ideas or at least motivation.
This Q&A was pulled from about a 50-minute interview, so you cutting it to size was quite a challenge. I really loved our conversation, though, particularly as someone who’s in awe of people who can write novels. I keep trying to find the right idea for one, and keep bailing out. Someday …
In the meantime, I think this is a fun and quick look at the writing process, and of how a writer continues to find motivation and excitement in a form.
(This story originally appeared in SPIN in February 2021.)
The first story that I ever wrote for SPIN was about The Hold Steady, and specifically, about my trip to see them in London in March of 2020. It was right before the pandemic (which is a clever way of saying that it was totally during the pandemic, but we were simply still convincing ourselves that it wasn’t happening). I always laugh at the memory of those three shows, these sweaty, packed rooms of people from all over the world, an event that somehow didn’t include a devastating body count. About the only concession we made to the real world was that the meet-and-greets with the band didn’t feature the usual handshakes, just us all standing shoulder to shoulder without intentional skin-to-skin contact.
In London, the guys played some new songs and made clear that there was a new album on the way, but months later, as we all sat in a live-music-less world, the album never dropped. Understandably, the band was waiting until they could take the songs out on the road, but once it became clear that live shows weren’t on the horizon, the band decided to release Open Door Policy, their second album as a six-piece band (and their second with producer Josh Kaufman.)
The album is a real departure from most of the band’s previous work. There’s a lot more sonic composition, more complex layering that is common to Kaufman’s work. There are parts that feel like a Craig Finn solo album, and other guitar riffs that are clearly from the heart of THS. But there’s maturity and consequence in the lyrics, an evolution from the days when the kids were making the ER look kind of like an afterbar.
I liked doing this as a Q&A. Especially when I’m writing about a specific album in this way, I prefer to let the artists do most of the talking. I thought that Craig and guitarist Steve Selvidge both made me really think about what they were trying to do, where they succeeded, and what it means for the future of the band and the future of music if we can ever reach a post-pandemic world (fingers crossed).
(This story originally appeared in the Official 2020 New York Yankees Yearbook.)
Part 3 of my Pandemic Baseball series picks up right where Part 2 left off, and by this point in the season, I’d gotten enough glimpses of the bizarre day-to-day absurdities that the story almost wrote itself. I loved getting to highlight the things that I had never seen before, and would never see again — how about walk-off homers by the Mets at Yankee Stadium, or Yankees relievers scoring the winning runs in games despite never batting, or sacrifice flies to lead off innings?
It was all so weird, and it allowed me to play with a version of a quote that I heard sometime like 400 times during the season: “It’s 2020, man …” I think I got that into the story three separate times, but it’s perfect in its way. The 2020 was real, and the Dodgers’ championship rings are plenty shiny, but everything felt just enough like fantasy to allow us to shake off some of the individual moments. “It’s 2020, man,” was the perfect shoulder shrug in word form.
There’s fun stuff in here. I loved getting to tell the story of Deivi García’s debut and his repertoire with Erik Kratz. I really enjoyed learning that the Yankees were worse in late-and-close situations at home in 2020 than they had been in any year since the new Yankee Stadium opened, which seemed like a fairly clear indication that the special sauce of Yankees fans might be even more important that we’ve thought all these years (and I really loved Tampa Bay’s Blake Snell saying that he would sometimes curse at himself in the bullpen to make up for the absence of fans’ creative vulgarities).
This was a fun series to write. I missed the clubhouse access, and I missed the ability to write about things behind the scenes that fans weren’t seeing. This year, I kind of felt like I was sitting in the same seats as my readers were, which was challenging. But it also allowed me to (and really forced me to) see the game differently. I felt that this year, I was analyzing more than I was unveiling. It was more storytelling than reporting. I had fun with it. That said, I can’t wait to get back into the clubhouse sometime soon.
(This story originally appeared in theSeptember 2021 edition of Yankees Magazine.)
For Part 2 of my overhead view of pandemic baseball, I focused mainly on the sights and (lack of) sounds in Yankee Stadium. Covering baseball in 2020 was an enormous challenge, with magazine deadlines looming and black pages staring back at you despite next to no access to the players. One of the great joys of writing about baseball is the downtime. As frustrating as it can be sometimes to stand around a Yankees’ clubhouse with 50 other reporters and no baseball players to be found, there’s still so much that we can all learn from getting to chat with players, to make small talk, to ask questions out of view of the entire beat.
Obviously, everyone knew that things would be different in 2020, but as one of very few people who could be in the park during games, I really wanted to give a sense of what it looked and sounded and felt like. I wanted to know how players got themselves amped up, how gameday operations employees tried to get some sound into the atmosphere to trick the players’ brains, and how everyone tried to make the games feel as normal as possible. I also spent time chatting with all the people who made the YES Network broadcasts work despite the announcers sometimes calling games from three time zones away.
I’m proud of this series, and of the way that I think it will stand as a reminder of how weird everything was in 2020, even when we were kind of pretending things were normal again.
(This story originally appeared in the August 2020 edition of Yankees Magazine.)
I can’t say that I’ve ever been one of those baseball fans who obsesses over prospects. The fact is, there’s so much projection involved, so much luck, so much precarious uncertainty, that sometimes it’s just smarter to wait until they do something before you fall in love. It helps that the teams that a I root for / work for are in big markets (or, in the case of the Mets, are in a big market but insist on pretending that they’re not) and are usually trading prospects for major league–ready players, rather than the other way around.
With that said, most of my favorite stories to write during my time in baseball have been minor league features. The access is about 4,000 times better than what you get with big leaguers and the stories are just more interesting. Sure, there are grinders who you’ll find in a big-league clubhouse, but it’s not too often that you’re going to be the one to tell the ultimate story about a guy’s harrowing adventure to establish an identity, as I was able to do with Estevan Florial, or to shine a light on the tumultuous life of a low-minors infielder who — having overcome homelessness during high school — is learning to play catcher on the fly, as I could with Donny Sands. When I lucked into telling the story of the Yankees attempting to turn Dermis Garcia into a pitcher, it was the type of feature that almost by definition couldn’t come from the clubhouse in Yankee Stadium. They just don’t do that stuff up in the majors.
New York Yankees
With Jasson Dominguez, some of both sides of that dichotomy came into play. First off, he’s as exciting a prospect as you’ll see, this massive tank of a person, just 16 years old when we were chatting. He’s a kid, but he’s also the guy who signed the biggest contract ever in the international signing period. The Yankees made a huge bet on the young Dominican, and when you see him for the first time, all you can do is nod and say, “Yeah, that makes sense.” As Donny Rowland, the Yankees’ international scouting director, said, “He’s the kind of player that makes the hair on your arm stand up when you watch him”
Back in January, I spent a few days with Jasson at the Yankees’ Dominican Baseball Academy. This was before the world came crashing down, as the youngster was embarking on his first full year in the system, starting down a road that could eventually lead him to the Bronx. I was there on his first day of on-field work for the year, when he struggled to make a nice-and-easy toss to his throwing partner. I watched him airmail like 12 balls, worried that my presence was making this kid nervous. Then it hit me: he’s never thrown a ball nice and easy in his entire life. Dominguez had been working since he was about 5 years old for the chance to play on a big-league field. He’s had scouts and advisers watching him his whole life, a constant need to put on a show. His life has been about showing how hard he could throw, not about showing that he could just toss a ball back and forth. It was illuminating, in not entirely positive ways.
Who knows what this lost year will do the Dominguez’s timeline. It was possible that he could have spent some time in one of the American short-season leagues this year, whether in Pulaski or Staten Island. Instead, he continues to wait. And while he does, the legend of the Martian will continue to grow in absentia.
I really enjoyed writing this one. It was fun to meet Jasson, fun to tell his story, and it’s always nice to go to the Dominican Republic (I even got to check out a game in the Dominican World Series while I was there, which was awesome). Who knows how long it will be before I can travel for another baseball story, so that part makes for a fun memory, as well.
(This story originally appeared in the August 2020 editionof Yankees Magazine.)
It’s hard to explain how weird it is to be writing about baseball right now. The diversions I’ve taken in the past few months to writing music stories … those have just been so much easier. I’m not even totally sure about why — after all, one of the stories I wrote was about going to three concerts in London days before the world shut down due to COVID-19. I’m not sure that was any more responsible than a baseball game; in fact, it was certainly more dangerous.
But there’s the obvious fact that for a lot of us, the idea of baseball (or any American sports) coming back when the tri-state area was exploding in March and April was as some future reward for good behavior. If we stayed home like we were told, and if we did everything we could to let the virus run its course, we could get our normal lives back.
New York Yankees
Instead, the situation today is objectively worse than it was even when the hospitals in New York City were overflowing. But here we are. If you can’t tell, I’m not thrilled about any of this, and it has felt really dirty these last few weeks to be putting out a magazine, even before Juan Soto tested positive on the day of the opener. You almost want it to rain, a feeling I’ve never before had on Opening Day. So it goes.
Anyhow!
My job demands that I enthusiastically welcome the return of the game that I do truly love. And I’m going to watch this season, cheering on some great stories, closely watching a Yankees team that should be legitimately special. So when I was assigned a story about the months that have led up to baseball returning, I didn’t want to go all Debbie Downer and pour cold water on everyone’s plans. Instead, I tried to look at some things we might not have been looking at that were going on while we should have been playing baseball.
New York Yankees
For example, I spoke to YES Network executives about running a sports network without sports. I spoke to a minor league marketing executive about marketing a league that doesn’t really exist this year. I chatted with players about using their time away to protest and support the Black Lives Matter movement, and I spoke to another guy on the team about playing video games semi-professionally in the interim.
Like I’ve said, none of this is going to be easy. Maybe we should be playing, maybe we shouldn’t. But the fact is, we are. So we might as well enjoy it, because, for better — or more likely, for worse — baseball is back. Finally.
One of the fun parts of writing some more music features has been getting to check out artists I wouldn’t otherwise find. Admittedly, I spend most of my listening time either on podcasts (hey, why not throw in a pitch for the shows that I produce for the Yankees Magazine Podcast Network!) or on groups that I already love, whether The Hold Steady, or Bruce Springsteen, or Jason Isbell, or anything else like that.
Obviously, though, just by virtue of having published a few pieces at SPIN, I’ve gotten on some publicists’ lists, and when I skimmed through an email blast about S.G. Goodman, something about it screamed out at me. I’m fascinated by Southern music — not from a point of great insight or intelligence (as I told my brother recently, when he asked how I became an expert in this, “I’m obviously faking it well enough!), but rather just looking at how different acts can emerge from a position that, at least to my mind, hasn’t been the primary focus of the genre. Goodman has a church choir background and sings a lot to the farmers and coal miners in her native Kentucky. She’s also an out member of the LGBTQ+ community, vocal in her opposition to Mitch McConnell. With the 2020 election on the horizon, and the world falling apart, I wanted to see how she handles the contradictions I saw in her life, and how she uses them to create art.
Admittedly, it helped that her album was produced by My Morning Jacket’s Jim James, which helped draw the attention of my editor at SPIN (and mine, as well). So even though it was a debut album from an unknown artist, there was a major figure in the industry involved, which helped me sell the piece.
Speaking with S.G. over FaceTime, as she sat under a giant hat, preparing for an afternoon at the lake, I was taken in by the same combination of earnestness and don’t-give-a-fuck-ness that also drew in James when they first met. We chatted for about an hour about what she wants from Kentucky, why she believes in the state, and why she stays (a topic that she addresses clearly on the album’s title track). But we also went deep on some of the pains that she sings about, the way she put out what is essentially a suicide note as the lead track on her debut album, and the way she refuses to pretend to be someone she’s not, even if it costs her record downloads/streams/sales. One of the most interesting points she made to me, which I wasn’t able to fit into the article, was that she actually enjoys the fact that the album was coming out at this moment, when people are stuck at home. She didn’t want her lyrics to be background noise on a commute. She wants people to wrestle with them. I really liked that about her.
I’m fascinated to see what she does next. The response so far has been really strong, and I adore the album. I hope that you’ll read the article, and also check out the music for yourself.
I’ve been blown away by Jason Isbell’s work for a long time now, in a way that has made me reconsider how I feel about music, in general. I used to say that I was a fan of classic rock, or of British rock, or of jam bands, or whatever. Then it was indie and alt-rock bands, whatever. Either way, I always thought that there were genres that I liked and genres that I didn’t like, and I thought that the music world worked that way.
I spent enough time with Isbell’s music, though — and later, with Brandi Carlile and others, to say nothing, in retrospect of how much Ryan Adams I played back in the day — to realize that genre is fluid, and interests are, too. This probably should have been obvious. Am I a country music fan? I don’t know that I’d say that. What I would say for sure, though, is that Jason Isbell isn’t a country music artist. That’s too limiting.
So when SPIN asked me to interview Isbell for a piece coming out around the release of his new album, Reunions, I obviously jumped at the chance. I had so much I wanted to talk to him about, so much that I wanted to learn from him. When I heard the first single, “Be Afraid” — ironically, while in London for some Hold Steady shows, just a few days before the whole world shut down — I was excited by a good, driving rock song that had something to say. A few weeks later, when I really sat down with the whole album to prepare for the interview, I realized what I had missed the first time around. Somehow, Jason Isbell had written the perfect album for this precise moment in time, only he did it long before the moment started. Which makes you understand that this all started long before we might realize.
I don’t imagine I’ll have too many interviews over my career that I’ll enjoy more than this one. Isbell was awesome — open, challenging, engaging. He really helped me understand how his brain works, how he sees the world around him, how he draws inspiration, and how he turns it into beautiful but brutal and admonishing songs.
(This article originally appeared in New Jersey Monthly.)
Almost four years to the day before this article ran in NJ Monthly, my family was at a birthday party for a friend’s 2-year-old, and the entertainment was a guy named Miguel Cervantes. We knew Miguel as our then-5-year-old son’s music teacher, so we were excited to see him at the party.
A few months later, randomly scanning the Playbill.com website, I saw an announcement of the new star of the Hamilton production opening in Chicago: Miguel Cervantes!
It was an incredible thing to confront, this idea that maybe should have been obvious but hadn’t impacted me yet. How many of the people that we confront every day — our kids’ baseball coaches, their teachers, our waiters — could one day become one of the biggest stars in the theater world.
Cervantes led the Chicago cast for all three years that it ran, and while there, he suffered an unimaginable tragedy, losing a daughter to a brutal struggle with epilepsy. He and his wife were very open about the whole process, and when Adelaide finally succumbed to the disease, the entire theater community embraced the couple. Despite having just a middling connection to Cervantes, I felt heartbroken, too.
So when he was announced as the new lead of the Broadway production, I pitched a piece about him, not expecting that just days after our interview, the entire industry would go dark indefinitely. Someday, though, Cervantes will be back on Broadway in the role of a lifetime, and I’ll always remember the chat we had, and the moment that I realized that my kid’s music teacher was Alexander F’ing Hamilton.
This one came out of nowhere. I was planning on traveling to Las Vegas for a conference, and because I was going two-thirds of the way across the country, and because a co-worker had a sudden conflict arise, my editor suggested that I follow up the Vegas trip by checking out an Aaron Judge All Rise Foundation event in Fresno, California. Obviously, I wasn’t about to say no to that.
Since I was heading out there with a few days to spare, I somehow convinced Aaron’s people to let me go to the fundraising dinner they were holding, then spent some time at Fresno State’s football game two nights later, where they honored Judge on the field. In between, I used some downtime to check out Yosemite National Park.
The story that I eventually wrote came out a lot of confusion I was feeling throughout my time in Fresno. The events were … small? I don’t mean that in a negative way, and I think it’s probably a function of my New York–area mentality that I even bumped against it. But the fundraiser didn’t have any media, didn’t have any celebrities. It certainly could have. If Judge had allowed the media inside (or even outside), plenty of reporters would have jumped at the chance. I was there almost by accident.
In spending time around the family, and with Aaron’s agent, what became very clear was that this was by design. It’s not that they don’t have big goals for the foundation, it’s just that they want to honor those who have been with them from the start. What they seem to be saying is that there will come time for the massive events. For now, though, better to reward those who have been loyal. It was blindingly obvious as I watched Aaron chatting with his former college teammates that it just doesn’t cross his mind that there might be some distance between them, some difference in where the world has taken them. That’s remarkable, and it’s a skill!
Aaron’s family is insistent on loyalty, almost fanatically so. And as you talk to his parents, Patty and Wayne, and watch them interact with people, you can see how Aaron became the way he is, the standup superstar in New York, the humble megastar.
I really tried to show that side of him, and the way he got where he is. Largely, what I saw was that he is who he has always been, in a good way. I hope you’ll read and enjoy.
