I sat talked with the Human Pursuits newsletter about growing up in this music scene, the history of AbsolutePunk, and what I’d tell my younger self:

It’s funny, I think about it and it’s exactly the type of advice younger Jason wouldn’t listen to… But it would be that you should be more willing to admit that you are wrong. Like, to understand that what you are thinking right now is not what you are going to think for the rest of your life. The convictions you have are not universal absolutes, they are not things that are going to be steady forever… To be malleable with that, and to always be questioning your own prior beliefs. 

Younger Jason needed to be the best, needed to be huge, and needed to have a giant audience following everything he was writing. It took me until 8 years ago to realize that was a dream I had when I was 15. I was sitting here at 35 thinking “I don’t want that at all.” There’s no part of me that has that goal, no part of me that wants to be driven by that. But I was still allowing myself to be driven by that idea I had as a kid… Letting myself be brought down because I thought it was “a goal of mine.” I wish I would’ve realized earlier that I did not need to be stuck to these ideas that I had, and that I should always be evaluating these things. Like, what do I want to do now? What do I want to do moving forward? I hope Jason of now can take that advice and try to apply it on a more regular basis.

There’s an interview with me in the latest issue of the Music Journalism Insider newsletter. You can read the full thing here. There’s a lot of talk about the early days of AbsolutePunk.net, what the website has transitioned into, and some of my thoughts on music journalism in general:

At the time, I was starting to think that it didn’t make sense for there to be like 3000 individual band pages and fan pages. There would be a New Found Glory fanpage and an MXPX fanpage and a Blink-182 fanpage. I wanted to write about all of those bands, but I didn’t want to make individual sites for every single of them. So there was a little bit of backlash from people who just wanted to see Blink-182 wallpapers or whatever. But it was the early 2000s, so it didn’t really matter that much to me—I was 18 and I was just goofing around online in my dorm room. I didn’t know that it was ever going to be an actual job.