OPE! Mixtape #39: Hey now

Hey now, some important newsletter updates

Welcome to OPE!, the weekly newsletter by music journalist and critic Brady Gerber. This is where I share my favorite links of the week and new music reviews along with announcements and life updates. All typos are intentional.

Well, hello there. How are you?

Happy September. I’m back from another longer-than-expected break. The Summer bummer days are finally over. Happy Fall.

The Oasis and Britpop feature I’ve been working on for a while finally ran. No, I did not realize this would be published the week Oasis would announce their reunion shows. We’ll see if they commit to those tour dates next year.

I also have an important update: As much thinking and debate, I’m making the difficult yet necessary decision to add a paywall to my weekly link round-ups and song reviews.

I don’t take this decision lightly. I’ve tried hard to keep this newsletter free for as long as possible, especially since I owe the beginnings of my writing career to running a free music blog that I published purely out of love. The differences between the high school me who started that blog (RIP Headphone Nation) and the 31-year-old me writing these words are … well, a lot. Too many to list. Here’s the most relevant difference: In my 30s, I’m much more mindful of time. The time I have available in my day. All the tasks and activities that use up my time. How I wish to spend my time, and who I want to spend that time with. I’m reminded every day of time. I’m still young, but I’m old enough to understand the reality and true value of time. I also think it relates to the marker of a good life: How much did I enjoy the passage of time?

Time is especially on my mind as a full-time freelance writer. Every day, I have to calculate how to balance my time on meaningful work that pays well—pays the bills, pays for groceries and gas, allows me to save a little for the long term, etc—and my time away from my computer to instead be with friends and family, or focus on fun hobbies that allow me to recharge and which have nothing to do with my career. To paraphrase I think Eno: You need to go to work so that you can leave work.

When thinking about the list of things that ate up most of my time in a week, I realized that OPE! fell into an unfortunate category. This newsletter was related to my career, yet it did not pay well (or anything, really) while demanding more time and effort than a hobby. It also used up my precious and finite writing energy that I could use on more demanding yet fulfilling projects. OPE! is a lot of work, but it keeps me from being able to leave work. That’s a bummer.

But I still love OPE!. I love having this little corner of the internet to keep me engaged with all the new music I would otherwise miss; if nothing else, running OPE! forces me to pay attention to all those music press releases I get every day. It’s a space I want to keep growing in whatever shape that is most sustainable for my life. Life won’t get cheaper either, so I need to be mindful of making sure that the effort I’m putting into my work is building towards something that is satisfying creatively, financially, or ideally both. So instead of giving it up, I want to try to make OPE! feel more fair to the time left available to me.

Another reason for adding this paywall is more practical: It’ll keep me accountable to a consistent schedule. As some of you may know, I’ve been very sporadic with this newsletter lately. This is partly because of some life events that I could not control, but also because frankly, I felt little desire to work on this newsletter since I was getting so little out of it. Knowing that more people are paying for this newsletter will light a fire under me to not only keep OPE! going, but also make it better and make my mixtapes more unique to share music that you can’t find anywhere else.

Here’s how this new plan will look:

• Free Subscriber: For this weekly newsletter, I’ll always keep my introduction essay free, because I know some of you love these and it’s still a fun way to stay in touch. I’ll also send out the occasional free newsletter whenever I have a new feature or major announcement to share, as well as any occasional personal or random essays I want everyone to check out. I might experiment with fun and random posts to switch things up from time to time too. Who knows.

• Monthly Paid Subscriber: For five dollars per month, you’ll have access to my weekly round-up of my favorite links and my mixtapes with new and exclusive song reviews. Five dollars is what I end up paying with tip whenever I go to a coffee shop in Los Angeles to get a large black coffee and work on this newsletter and other assignments. A paid membership is essentially you saying, “Hey now, I’ll buy you a cup of coffee for some music recommendations that I can’t get elsewhere, sent directly to my email.”

• Yearly Paid Subscriber: Same deal as above except at an overall discounted rate. If you commit to supporting OPE! for a year at a time, you’ll end up saving a bit of cash.

And that’s it. Five dollars a month. Realistically I could and should charge more. But five dollars is all I’d need from you to keep OPE! going for now.

I understand that some of y’all may not be in a position to consistently pay five dollars a month. I would still love for you to keep your free subscription so that I can keep you in the loop on everything new from me that’s coming up through my weekly essays and check-ins. You can also remain a free subscriber and tip me directly via my PayPal coffee fund any amount you wish. Thank you so much.

But enough about all that. Let’s get to the dang thing. Here are this week’s links and songs.