ANT ZINE | Interview


Interview with Glenn McDonald of The War Against Silence
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Glenn McDonald is the sole proprietor of a weekly music review Web site entitled The War Against Silence, which is an amazing mix of insightful music criticism and breathtaking prose that speaks expertly to the human condition, goings on in his personal life, and the interplay of all three. Often this happens within a single paragraph. Ant Zine recently caught up with McDonald, a Massachusetts resident and full time software designer, and tossed him a few questions:

You run your own Web site (www.furia.com) that features your music, photographs, essays, stories and a separate music review column entitled The War Against Silence (www.furia.com/twas). TWAS boasts some of the best music/personal writing on the web. Is this the only medium for your writing? Does your work appear elsewhere?
Thanks! I occasionally write other things, but my site is overwhelmingly my focus. I've had other offers, but since I don't need to make money from this venture, and I don't mind laboring in relative obscurity, there's not much incentive to relinquish control. I think if I had my way everybody who writes about music would run their own little sites, and we'd leave the commercial publications to report gossip and tour dates. You have to learn a lot about a reviewer to have any idea how their tastes correlate with yours, and the usual magazine setup is no good for that.

Do you like the balance between a real world job and your creative side (writing, making music, etc.), or would you rather work on your artistic endeavors full time?
Oh, in the abstract I'd rather not have to do my job. I like designing software, but I like writing about music and taking pictures and playing guitar more, and yet I get to spend so much less time at them. That's sort of illogical. But of the things I do, software design is the one I'm least emotionally invested in, so it's the one where I least mind having to account for other people's constraints and opinions. The day job buys me (literally and figuratively) the freedom to do anything I want the rest of the time.

In your "About" section, you say it takes upwards of 8-10 hours to crank out an update every Thursday. How do you muster up the determination and motivation to do that every Wednesday night, usually to the detriment of sleep time?
I really don't know. It's fairly draining and relentless, so even I would have assumed I'd miss weeks here and there. But somehow I don't. Obviously it helps that I really like writing about music, and most weeks I actively look forward to getting to do it again. Plus the structure of a music review is always there for support, even if I don't always use it. Plus by this point the whole thing has its own inertia.

I know that just about everyone I've mentioned TWAS to has become a fan and a loyal reader. I think it's because your style is so unpretentious and honest--the complete opposite of most music writing out there. What do you think about music journalism?
Well, I'm sure you'd get some argument about "unpretentious," but I know what you mean. What I do is not journalism. Even calling it music reviewing is partly disingenuous. I write about my experience with music. I think most people who write about music try to write about an abstract, hypothetical listener's experience with it, or else they try to somehow write about music without writing about anybody's experience with it. To me those are inherently unrewarding approaches. Music matters because it affects us, so unless you write about how it affects you, or you go find somebody else it affects and you write about them, you're wasting your time. Music reviews are the traditional refuge of writers who know how to form sentences but have yet to think of any good reasons for doing so.

Speaking of writing, what writers do you admire?
My standard answers are JD Salinger, Raymond Carver, Orson Scott Card and Robert Heinlein. If I actually had to write like somebody else, though, it would probably be Gene Wolfe or Louis De Bernieres. But then I also love Tim Cahill and Dave Barry, neither of whom I'd really want to write like. Douglas Coupland, Peter Hoeg, Greg Egan and Kim Stanley Robinson are all great. My three favorite books from the last few years are De Bernieres' Corelli's Mandolin, Richard Powers'The Gold Bug Variations and Brooks Hansen's The Chess Garden.

What music publications do you read? How do you get turned on to new music?
The only music magazine I get these days is ICE, which is just about release dates and defective boxed sets. I mostly find out about new music by tracking down the other ends of the loose threads from the things I already know about. Who else is on the same label, what band was the bass player in before, who did they tour with, etc. I follow a lot of random web links, I read a lot of random mailing lists and bulletin boards, and I buy a lot of records I don't know much about, just in case they're amazing.

What music has been taking up your listening time of late?
My listening tends to be centered, time-wise, around whatever it is I've just realized I don't know enough about. I'm still listening to quite a lot of Japanese pop, more than I allow to monopolize the column. My Scandinavian death-metal thing is tapering off a little now that I feel like I'm caught up again. Here's a quick survey of the current contents of my devices. In my main changer here at home: Atom and His Package's Hamburgers EP, the new A*Teens album Pop 'Til You Drop, Every Little Thing's Kiwoku single, the best of Belly and the collected works of the Creation. The pile I took to work today: globe, Lights; Starlet, When Sun Falls on My Feet; Mary Timony, The Golden Dove; Trans Am, TA; Del Amitri, Can You Do Me Good?; a-ha, Lifelines. In my car changer: Venom, New, Live & Rare disc 1; Peter Gabriel, So; the Meat Puppets, Too High to Die; Savatage, Edge of Thorns; Do As Infinity, Deep Forest; Propagandhi, Less Talk, More Rock. In my DVD player, Hitomi Yaida's concert video. My mini-CD player has some Alanis Morissette b-sides, my bedside player has Homesick and Happy to Be Here by Aberdeen, and my discman most recently had Josh Rouse's Under Cold Blue Stars. And if you press down on the vegetable-drawer handle, my refrigerator plays the extended remix of "Doot Doot."

TWAS has been around for about seven years. Do you see it continuing for a long time to come?
Extrapolating from a straight line, I guess so. In theory, I could get sick of it any week, but if that hasn't happened yet, it's hard to see why it ever would. My file-naming convention has four digits for the issue number, so I've got the space.

Any idea of the size of your readership?
Not with any kind of precision, but rough evidence suggests something in the mid-single-digit thousands. Fewer if you mean people who read every single week, more if you mean people who visited once and remember it fondly. I used to be stunned when the column got mentioned anywhere by people I didn't personally know, but now I'm merely appreciative.

You're a huge soccer fan and the last couple of updates have been about this year's World Cup. A prevalent stereotype of music fans is that they don't like sports. Do you see any correlation between sports and music?
Kids polarize, especially boys, and especially around music and sports, so the lines between sports-averse music geeks and music-ignorant jocks get drawn early in life, and tend to persist. But sports are as much a way a culture manifests itself as music or movies or food, so there are things to be learned if you feel like learning them that way. I don't think worse of anybody who doesn't follow sports, but then I don't necessarily think worse of people who don't follow music, either.

You're also an avid photographer and many of your pictures have appeared on your site. What's the most beautiful thing you've ever shot through a camera lens?
Tracey Ullman.


-Doug Sell