RIP No Depression

I don't really do too much of the magazine thing. Newspapers I devour like mad, but the amount of magazine reading I do is fairly low. Except for the random Entertainment Weekly, Time Out New York or, more recently, Parenting in a doctor's office waiting room, I basically have three magazines I read. I have a subscription to Trains that I usually tear through the day it arrives once a month, the train-geek that I am. Our New Yorker comes every week and I usually have a stack of them that I still need to read laying around. It is a really hard one to keep on top of, with such long, in-depth articles and then the next issue is in your mailbox before you've even made a dent in the last one.

The last magazine I read is No Depression. I don't have a subscription to this one, it is only bimonthly and I just pick each issue up when I'm at the record store or Borders. The best music magazine out there, No Depression is usually my companion for several weeks on the subway as I read articles here and there. I will always start with the feature stories about the musicians I'm already into and then move on to the live reviews before checking out the articles about up and coming artists, then I read the other feature articles and finish with the record reviews. It really is my favorite subway/bus companion. Or at least it was.

I opened the March-April issue of No Depression and turned to the "Hello Stranger" department on page two, their name for the "from the editor" section that many magazines have at the front. I read the first sentence and my heart sank.

Dear Friends:
Barring the intersession of unknown angels, you hold in your hands the next-to-the-last edition of No Depression we will publish.

I read sadly as the three owners of the magazine explained in this letter to the readers that they could no longer sustain the magazine. The cause was a combination of many things, from the drop in advertising due to smaller budgets at the record labels (and less small labels) to the rising cost of paper to new postal regulations written to benefit big publishers and hurt smaller ones.

It also has a lot to do with the fact that there are tons less independent record stores and book stores where you would be more likely to find a magazine like No Depression which, like the disappearance of small labels, is partially the fault of the move to downloadable music. Which means my favorite music magazine folded because of you iPod assholes. So thanks.

But seriously, I'm really going to miss this magazine.

There is still a website with reviews, news and blogging by the publishers/founders, with plans to expand it to have more material. But it is doubtful there will be the same long features that the magazine contained. There are also plans to put out a semiannual "bookazine" that right now they are not really clear what it will be.

It won't be the same.

No Depression was my favorite music magazine not just because most other music magazines suck, though that has a little to do with it, but because it was started and run by a couple of true music geeks, Peter Blackstock and Grant Alden, along with Kyla Fairchild.

Grant and Peter were (and still are) a couple of freelance music writers living in Seattle in the early 90s who got together to create a magazine focusing on the fringe country scene, taking the name from a song made famous by the Carter Family in the 40s and introduced to a new generation by Uncle Tupelo on their 1990 debut album. The tag line for the magazine always included "Alt.Country (Whatever That Is) Bimonthly" even though it was never just about that anyway. They eventually changed it to "Surveying The Past, Present And Future Of American Music" a couple of years ago but even that wasn't a pigeonhole statement since they've done feature stories on Brits Nick Lowe and Billy Bragg, among many others from outside the U.S.

No Depression started as a quarterly in 1995 (going bimonthly a year later) and I had been living in Seattle, home of the magazine, for a little over a year. It came at pretty much the same time that I was really delving into the alt-country movement instead of just being a casual listener. The fact that it was centered around where I was living meant that I could easily check out a lot of the bands they were writing about. They really opened a lot of people's eyes to the fact that Seattle even had an alt-country scene. Turned out they had a better one than most cities.

No Depression was a place that I first heard about musicians that I would come to love, including Rilo Kiley, Old 97's, Nickel Creek and a bunch of others. I even discovered legendary artists I had never known before, but were major influences on many of my favorite musicians, like Ralph Stanley.

The reason I loved No Depression so much was not just because they focused on the kind of music that I love, though that certainly has a lot to do with it. Peter, Grant and the writers they hired really conveyed their love of music to the reader without the pretense and snobbery you get from so many other music journalists, who are more interested in letting you know how cool they are for knowing some obscure band than actually letting the music be the focus (I'm looking at you David Fricke ).

That is the great thing about these guys, they aren't trying to be the coolest kids in the room, (*cough* everyonewhowritesforSpin *cough*) they just love to write about music that moves them. And if they can turn other people on to it, well there really isn't another motive for what they do.

In this world of shitty corporate music magazines like Rolling Stone, Spin and their many clones it was nice to know that No Depression could even exist. That a small, niche music mag run by a few people out of their spare bedrooms and writing about artists that don't even show up on the radar of those other rags could find an audience was such a good thing for the music lovers like me.

When I picked up the May-June issue I hoped I would find out that one of those "unknown angels" actually had come to the rescue. But it was not to be.

I've been reading the last issue as slowly as I can, trying to make it last.

I'll keep following these guys to be sure, going to the website and buying this new book series. But it won't be the same. I can't read the website on the subway and the book won't come out every two months. I'm sad about what this could mean for the future of the music journalism.

So long No Depression.

Thank you Peter, Grant and Kyla for the last thirteen years of great writing about great music.

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