951 want it reckless
on asking and receiving
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For the last decade, I’ve spent my New Years Day writing myself a letter to open on the last day of the year. The exercise is part reflection, part diary, part exorcism; the holidays have always depressed me a little and I always feel I have something heavy I need to let out and put down. I blame the lack of structure, the liminal days that bleed into each other both backward and forward, but I think the truth is simpler: there’s just a little too much time for thinking when the nights are long.
In my letter this year, which I’ve tried hard to forget so I will be astonished and sentimental when I open it in twelve months time, I wrote a bit about how I manifested my vision board last year. Its coming to fruition felt like a process that I watched with astonishment from the sidelines of my life, even as other, more functional parts of me worked directly toward that end. The watching parts were afraid to believe, afraid to look and to look away, as I turned myself back towards music as the central pillar of my life.
The guiding phrase of my 2025 was “Better than FREE? SEARCHING,” which I promptly paraphrased to “Better than knowing? Finding out.” My whole life I felt deeply uncomfortable with flux and fallibility. I hated being a kid because I wanted to stop changing and know who I was going to be, for the rest of forever. I was afraid to want anything because I might fail to obtain it—better to wish for nothing and be happy with what you’ve got.
In the fall I went to a talk with a speaker who had started his own company a few years prior. Someone asked him if he regretted anything about his trajectory, and he answered, gravely, “Regret is a backward-facing emotion. I’m forward-facing, so I don’t really experience regret.” I was inspired by this declaration, and told two friends that I agreed with him: no regret.
Since then, I’ve been downright haunted by my regrets, which present themselves intrusively, randomly, for my consideration, a parade of undead memories. Most are related to something stupid I said without thinking, some to things I wish I’d said but didn’t, but a few especially pointed regrets are those of wishing I had wished.
In my music, I’m a yearner. Bike Lane is built on the back of my wanting. But in my everyday life, I eschew emotional risk. Music has always been my Big Love, but I’ve considered it more of a special interest than a career option. I told a friend recently that in adolescence I developed a delineation between my real life and my emotional life, the former in which I was practical and the latter in which I was positively washed away by my feelings. Music became my primary outlet for expression, both writing and curating, because it was a safe way to say what I was thinking, if only to myself.
I’ve done a lot of work in my adulthood to merge these two selves, this newsletter being one big step towards taking my artistic practice seriously. Writing the songs that would become the first Bike Lane album was another big step, largely facilitated by the pandemic and the emotional devastation it afforded me (joking, sort of). In the last year, working on turntable has really brought forth a level of confidence I didn’t realize I was lacking until it appeared, allowing me to publicly grant my life shape and legitimacy that I didn’t before.
My vision board party is next week, and I’ve been finding myself imagining what magical phrase I might find to shape my 2026. I’m certainly not finished learning the lesson that finding out is better than knowing; I’ve heard running a startup is a long journey of many small failures that hopefully lead to one slightly larger success. I’m willing to admit that I actually want this thing to work, to create a community space that’s made for music, that’s not run by evil technology corporations, that’s useful and that yields meaningful connections.
In 2024 I wrote a lot about how I was feeling kind of distant from music, which is another way of saying I was feeling distant from myself. In 2025, I felt closer to myself and to music than ever, and it was a joy—the kind of relief you see in memes and movies about war—to rediscover some of the songs that I loved as a kid and feel them again like I did then. Not to be corny, but I attribute the return of sensation to pursuing my dreams.
I realized as I was tagging and categorizing all my music on turntable that I’ve been making playlists for ten years. Sometime soon, I’ll throw a big party for my 1000th playlist, and I’ll have to decide if I’m going to reset the rules, keep going, or close this chapter completely. Lately I’ve been finding myself gravitating towards listening to full albums or even discographies, with spurts of playlisting in between.
Most likely I’ll keep making playlists exactly as before, because of the expression mechanism I wrote about above. I need the constraints of the format to provide an interesting challenge for my logical brain while I look for myself in the songs. What would I be without this diary?
A few people have advised me to write down my goals with turntable as I begin looking for funding, as I need to be clear about what I can compromise on and what I can’t. I want to create an online space where people can share and connect over music. I want people to feel excited about curation and active discovery. I want to utilize data as a tool for understanding, not an ends to which music is just a means.
If you’re here, all the way at the end of this article especially, you probably feel similarly to me about music and the way that streaming has negatively impacted artists, fan communities, writers and critics, and even casual listeners. After I talked to Liz Pelly in early 2025, I felt like I could see what needed to change but wasn’t sure how to begin. Everyone I talked to said something similar; poor alternatives, not enough incentive, difficult tradeoffs. A year on, I’m excited about the future that we’re creating as a community of people who genuinely just love music and want to see creativity thrive in dark times. How will we ultimately bring this future to the people?
I’m still finding out.
love this!!!!