Welcome To My Blog

I hate Instagram & new music coming soon

Hello friend. You're receiving this first post from my newsletter because you previously bought my music or subscribed to my posts. I am moving away from posting on corporate social media, and hope you will join me as I experiment with the ancient art of blogging.

I will post weekly round-ups of music, writing and other things I think you will find interesting. Sometimes I will have things to promote and occasionally I will write something longer. It is still an experiment, and I'd love to hear from you. I hope you stick around.

Quitting the algorithm

I’ve always struggled with perfectionism. Especially when it comes to music, where I can spend weeks fussing over details no one will notice because I am too afraid of sharing my work. I compare myself to others more than one should. I am easily distracted and tend to procrastinate.

Which is all to say that Instagram is a horrible place for me.

Everyone’s doing better than me: playing more shows, making more music, creating more content, gaining more followers, getting more streams. The solution, according to the ads in my stream are simple: post more, purchase this course, use that scammy music promotion service, grind.

But Instagram doesn’t want me to create anything other than content for the app. It doesn't want me to express myself authentically, nor does it want me to forge genuine connections with my audience or other artists. It wants to keep me on the app. It wants me to create content that keeps you on the app. It wants you scrolling.

The longer I spend on Instagram the more I can feel my brain turning into a slurry. While I am glued to the dopamine slot machine; the scope of possibilities narrows as I am stuck in this land of unimaginable horrors and gleaming influencer smiles.

I hate that the app I used to use to share cute holiday photos or pictures of my breakfast has become a nightmare feed of short videos, AI generated slop and ads. I hate how Meta has hijacked our attention and used it to promote fascism and AI slop.

So I deleted Instagram from my phone and I don’t really miss it at all. I don't need my information fed to me in 90 second video form. I don't need my view of the world being distorted by self interested billionaires in their hall of mirrors.

But I do miss people. I miss sharing updates about my life, my work and my art. I miss reading updates about other people's life and art. Instagram is a terrible place, and I would have left years ago if it weren't for all the good people I know there.

Sharing without the performance

I used to post all the time. I was prolific on Twitter, and finding an audience there encouraged much longer form writing, some of which got published in reputable outlets, and some of it even got cited in academic publications.

Before Twitter there were blogs. Before that there were MySpace bulletins. Until quite recently, I found sharing things on the internet to be generally quite rewarding.

There weren’t the same pressures to perform. There wasn’t some opaque algorithm determining our success. There wasn’t so much noise. There weren’t metrics we could judge ourselves against. The stakes just felt lower.

It helped that these were all primarily text based. Instagram wants to see your face. I, on the other hand, do not wish to be perceived. I never really chose to make Instagram my primary social media. It was just sort of the default option where most of my friends were when Elon Musk started destroying Twitter.

Posting on Instagram became a chore. I didn’t like the way it made me feel about myself, I didn’t like how much effort it took, I didn’t like talking to my phone, I didn’t like editing reels, I didn’t like taking selfies. And I especially hated how it could impact my self esteem. So I stopped posting all together.

Sharing on my own terms

I had been flirting with the idea of starting a newsletter for a while. But for various reasons, mostly relating to limited time and capacity, I never quite managed to make it happen.

And then, a few weeks ago a First Floor, a newsletter I recommend you follow if you aren’t already, posted about the challenges of social and why so many artists are starting newsletters:

The ubiquity of words like “doomscrolling” and “enshittification” speaks to the misery of our current online existence, and anyone who’s spent even a little time on social media knows that the space is rife with ads, shameless self-promotion, bad-faith actors and conflict-inducing rage bait. It’s unclear how much that’s prompted anyone to actually leave platforms like Instagram behind, but there’s no shortage of stories about Gen Z—who are often skewered as being antisocial, brainrot-addled internet junkies—actively seeking a way out, whether they’re voluntarily deleting apps en masse or simply seeing the ability to be offline as a new kind of luxury.

This leaves artists in a very tricky situation. As audiences have been steadily consolidated onto social media during the past two decades, musicians (along with labels, venues, promoters and pretty much anyone in the industry who’s trying to sell something) have effectively been forced to devote all sorts of time and resources into building an online following. The platforms have shifted over time, but regardless of whether they were working with MySpace and Facebook or Instagram and TikTok, the dynamic has been more or less the same, in the sense that artists, no matter how popular, are not only perpetually subject to the ever-changing whims of the algorithm, but also ultimately have little to no control over the tools they’re using to communicate with the public.

Yes. All of this. Yes.

I am starting a newsletter because I am sick of being pushed around by algorithms and apps. I have experienced many times how all the work you do to build an audience on these platforms can be taken away from you without notice.

But also because I want to go deeper. There is a limit to what you can do with a reel or a story. I want to redevelop my writing practice. I want the space to share context, tangents and deep thinking. I want space to be a bit weird and imperfect.

And finally, I have music that I want to promote. At the time of writing, I have 775 Instagram followers. When I post a story or reel to my music I would be lucky if Instagram showed it to 100 of those people and it’s pretty common that exactly zero of those people go through to my bio and click the link to go give it a listen. Which is all very disheartening when you consider the effort involved.

Email is relatively low effort, and far more effective at actually “driving conversions” than social media has ever been.

I have new music coming out next week

All of this is to say that I am dropping a new EP next week! It's called Transit Habitat, and I will tell you more about it next week.

This will be my first release of 2026 and I have many more planned for the year. I am embracing imperfection, and focusing on finishing things and getting them out the door.

In the meantime, you can find me on whatever streaming platform you use Go give Getaway Plan a listen, or even better, you can purchase my music on Bandcamp.