Welcome back to Left of The Dial! In this special edition, I’m answering all of your burning questions about the column. For about as long as I’ve been doing music reviews, I’ve been getting questions about why I do things the way I do. Probably the most common question I get is why I call it “Left of The Dial” in the first place. Well, worry not, as I’ll make sure to answer this nagging question and more! I hope you enjoy!
Why did you start a music review column?
The easiest way I can answer that is to say it’s because I’m passionate about music and want to share my favorite albums with the community. I grew up listening to a wide variety of tunes, and some of it was stuff that wasn’t common knowledge to the casual listener. That made it hard sometimes for me to talk about music with my peers growing up, because I’d bring up someone like Butch Walker and they’d stare at me like I had sprouted a second head.
Needless to say, I grew frustrated that I couldn’t easily connect with other people through my weird music tastes. Once I started college, I discovered a solution to my problem. Instead of getting frustrated and changing the subject, I’d teach people about the artists I admire, and that seemed to garner a positive response. I thought to myself “How could I share my favorite music with the masses?” and I found the solution in writing for The Critic.
How did you come up with the name “Left of The Dial?”
I get really excited when people ask me this, because I think the name is super clever when put into the proper context! “Left of The Dial” is a slang term that was coined to describe the alternative musical choices made by college radio DJs back in the late 70’s and well into the 80’s. As those of you familiar with NVU-Lyndon’s own 91.5 WWLR station know, college stations aren’t restricted to the same mainstream playlists that the larger stations are, so it’s a space for more obscure material to get some love. Back in the day, this music was usually found on non-commercial radio stations, which were on the left side of the radio dial, aka Left of The Dial.
The Replacements created the term for their 1985 single of the same name, which described the college radio phenomenon, and the name stuck in the community. The trigger to run with the name for me was when my dad gifted me with his copy of the compilation box “Left of The Dial.” Released by Rhino Records in 2004, it’s a collection of 4 mix CDs of 80’s post-punk and new wave songs, the same material that was made popular by college stations back in the day. Those are some of my favorite genres at the moment, and the name sums up my goal for this column perfectly: to introduce readers to music that’s off the beaten path.
How do you choose the music you’re going to write about?
I have a couple of ways to determine what I’ll write about. When I first started LOTD, I had a handful of albums queued up that I knew I wanted to talk about. Stuff like Incesticide, AM, and especially 21st Century Breakdown was born from that queue. As I went on, I found that it could be super interesting to talk about new records from my favorite artists as they came out. Both of my Ultra Q reviews were written within a month or so of each release, and the same could be said for my review of Butch Walker’s American Love Story. Green Day’s Father of All… was a little too late to the party by several months, but it followed the same idea. On the subject of timing, I’ll sometimes choose specific albums to write about at specific times. Case in point, EVE 6’s Horrorscope was written around the album’s 20th anniversary.
Funny enough, the most influential records to the column were ones I discovered and then decided to write about spur of the moment. Diarrhea Planet’s I’m Rich Beyond your Wildest Dreams was one of those, as well as ELO’s Out of The Blue. Heck, the latter record completely changed the way I approached my writing. That album was the first one I played on my own turntable, and I thought it would be fun to take a vinyl-themed approach to the writing style of that review as a little celebration of its significance to my musical journey. I found that the style improves the pacing of the column and makes it easier to consume, plus it’s easier for me to write.
Of course, I also pick albums based on my own set of restrictions. Since the point of the column is to introduce material that’s more obscure, I try to avoid albums that I feel are ‘too mainstream,’ like Green Day’s Dookie or American Idiot. When I talk about well-known artists like them, Nirvana, or The Rolling Stones, I try to pick albums in their catalogs that don’t get the same love as their signature records. I also try to avoid live albums and ‘greatest hits’ compilations, since they rarely include any ‘new’ material and I prefer to talk about songs in the context of their original release. Note that I say ‘try,’ because some of my choices don’t quite fit the restrictions, like with The Stones’ Sticky Fingers. I’m not perfect, but I certainly try!
What genre do you like personally? How does that influence what you write about?
Asking me to pick my favorite genre would be like trying to ask me to pick a favorite child, but I’ll try anyway. My tastes are constantly evolving, but I tend to stick to the softer side of rock throughout it all. I enjoy some pop-punk and power-pop, and I love me some gothic rock once in a while. As I stated earlier, I’m really into 80’s post-punk and new wave right now, which may have been made apparent by my review of the Violent Femmes’ self-titled debut. I’ll probably review a few more albums from this era in between my queued records. Though to be completely honest, I don’t like to define my music taste by genre because it doesn’t fall neatly into genre boundaries. Instead, I prefer to state my favorite bands and let people fill in the blanks. To answer that question, my top 5 are Green Day, Arctic Monkeys, Ultra Q, The Rolling Stones, and Nirvana, in no particular order.
I’m clearly biased to talk about my favorite bands more often on LOTD than other artists, and I admit that my choices for other albums fall within similar genre ranges. I am open to expanding my palate though, and I’m hoping some of these upcoming reviews will satisfy any cravings for more varied material.
Do you ever find some albums exhausting to listen to and write about? Have you ever given up on a piece and moved on to another idea?
Oh definitely! I don’t think a single album came easily to me in writing, but some definitely gave me more trouble than others. My early reviews, pre-Out of The Blue, were a total slog since I was still getting the hang of writing critically about music, especially 21st Century Breakdown due to its length and the ambiguous story that begged for interpretation.
So far, I haven’t had to completely give up on an album review, but there was one case where I had to scrap my original draft completely and start from scratch. This was the review for Ultra Q’s In a Cave in a Video Game EP. Despite my undying love for this band, they’re a challenge to write about because their obscurity leads to a lack of information about them online, particularly lyrics, and Jakob Armstrong isn’t the type of vocalist that clearly enunciates his words. I got stuck partway through the review because my usual approach of focusing on lyrics just wasn’t working. I ended up walking away from the computer and going for a car ride with my dad and brother. By talking through the issue, I was able to come up with a different way to frame the review, one that looks at the band through a compositional lens rather than a lyrical one. I dare say it’s my most creative review to date since I also referred to the piece of video art Armstrong created as a companion piece to the record. At some point, I’d like to republish it with the video embedded for your convenience.
Would you be interested in covering the music of student bands at NVU?
I expressed some interest in doing reviews based on student bands before, but I’m not quite sure how to approach it because I worry that reviewing work from students could garner unwanted backlash. Unlike my normal fodder where the artists in question probably won’t see my review or take it to heart, the artists at NVU would definitely see what I have to say about their record, and that could be a double-edged sword. I’d hate to get on anyone’s bad side by giving criticism that isn’t wanted, but it would also defeat the point of a review if I sugarcoated my thoughts.
I think the best way to do this would be to have the artists write in to request a review. That way, the artists know exactly what they should expect and any criticism I potentially give won’t be unwarranted. But that’s something to work on for the time being.
Do you plan on continuing LOTD after you graduate from NVU-Lyndon?
Seeing as how I’ll be graduating in the spring (as of writing this), I’d definitely like to continue LOTD, as I still have lots of records to write about! I can see myself continuing to write for The Critic for at least another year, but perhaps I might switch formats later on. Music reviews could translate wonderfully to video or multimedia formats, plus that would be a great learning avenue for me. Although LOTD may not be published through The Critic forever, it’ll stick around in some format for years to come.
Feature Photo by Becca Fauteux