The Diner Test: Writing to People, Not at Them (Kevin Alexander On JUST PRESS RECORD)

Kevin Alexander lives in anything but silence. He’s listening to and reviewing music all of the time. He’s working around airplanes (which, are loud!).

But despite all the sounds - he writes newsletters that presumably are read as alone as they are written, without audio, by people he’s mostly never met.

The act of the share is silent. Everything else is as noisy as it wants to be. It’s a weird detail.

That silence allows for a radical practice to emerge. Over the years of writing On Repeat Records, Kevin’s continuously returned to the habit of writing to specific people, not aimed at a wide audience.

It frequently involves names on post-it notes. It’s a method to (silently) imagine a real life conversation and what he would want to tell a person he can imagine sitting across the table from him, over coffee, at a diner.

He knows if he’s writing to everyone he’s writing to no one. He knows if he’s writing to Janet, because she already loves The Cars so she will totally understand where he’s going with an explanation, he’s got a (pun intended) lane to steer the conversation down.

It’s a much slower approach than churning out suggestions for a mass market publication. There aren’t any metrics you’d want to hide behind here. The work is exposed. And in that discomfort, of risking a quiet communication to persuade an internet friend to try listening to a piece of music, actual connection lives.

On Repeat Records runs 3-4 pieces in any given week. Kevin’s gold standard of engagement is actual email responses from his readers. In his independent critic world, a 5 paragraph reply is worth 10,000 likes in signal value.

We got into this when he returned to Just Press Record. In the absence of standard metrics, how do you figure out what matters? As he explained it - if people respond with stories, he knows he’s onto something.

Because “Great art doesn’t scale. It spreads.”

Years ago Kevin got the chance to review a Talk Talk album. It was just another review, and nothing he thought would be special, especially since his review was about 30 years post release. But four or five years down the road from originally publishing his writeup, and that review still gets read, and it still triggers email responses. He’s heard about how the record got people through college, through heartbreaks, and through darkness.

Semi-obscure artists? Check. Impassioned please like he would give a friend over coffee? Check.

Result? A genuinely human reflection on a piece of art that resonates with other genuine humans who find it.

He never saw it coming and, looking back, he never should have expected it either.

You can’t force what resonates. You can only create conditions for it.

And you have to have a system in place, formally or informally, to sit with it and shut the f*** up.

If he’d been chasing engagement metrics, he probably would have skipped Talk Talk entirely. But because he was writing to people, for people, the darts found their way to their bullseyes.

I read Kevin because he writes with a sense of honesty. I told him he’s like Lester Bangs without the biker gangs and drugs. If the music happens in between soccer games and Quik Stops, that’s where it happens. There’s no shame in that.

The regular life of it all isn’t a weakness, it’s context. And bespoke context is what separates Kevin - and any of us - from the content machines. This is our way of being a person creating culture, and not part of the algorithm manufacturing content.

We listened to some Glitterrer and Ned Russin interview clips together on this episode.

An overarching takeaway is how important it is to remember that you don’t need a bigger room with a larger audience to be successful.

All you need is a room where people can feel seen.

The post-it notes. The willingness to wait for the Talk Talk surprises. The station wagon between Quik Stop soundtracks. The three-to-four pieces a week.

The context makes the art.

Not because they scale.

But because they spread.

ps. For my Pulp Fiction people, an older Cultish Creative post I still think of regularly.