Welcome back to The Club List, a newsletter about making a business out of what you love.

You’re probably not fully ready to get back to hard business mode, and neither am I. So we’ll save that energy for the next issue and do things a little differently today. This one is a personal note from me, plus my album of the year list, because there are few things I annually enjoy doing more than figuring out how on earth to highlight just 10. (I never quite manage to stop there.)

Keep scrolling, and consider putting this Chromatics song on as you do.

The Club List is powered by beehiiv, the best newsletter platform I’ve ever used. Want to try it out? This link will give you a 30-day trial and discounts past that. I may make a small commission from this.

Time Rider

As a marketer, I spill a fair bit of ink encouraging people to define and tell their narrative. Artists, businesses, brands - everyone. If you don’t know your story, no one else gets to know it either.

Sometimes, the narrative you tell is a matter of setting intention. Perhaps the story you’re telling is the narrative you are working towards embodying, and saying it creates a positive sort of cognitive dissonance where you can then step into it.

For me, I’ve been spending most of this year unfolding my own narrative, to you. All of it has been personal in its way. This part, especially.

I write from my parents’ home in West Virginia, where I have a chance each holiday season to remember I started out as the son of the science-inclined former foreman of a family-owned die-casting plant, as well as of a bright stay-at-home mom who was never very into science but deeply fascinated by books and history. Like lots of families, many of our viewpoints have diverged, but most of our values have not. They are older now, and I am too.

When I was 5, they would let me watch the Disney Channel on my own, but almost never any other channels. In the early 1990s, the network would regularly show classical performances from a youth orchestra, and I found myself skipping to PBS for other shows like it. At some point on a similar program - maybe there, maybe on Disney, who knows? - I saw the New York City skyline on TV. 

I outgrew my hometown before I was fully done growing.

And that part of me is still in this room I once grew up in, resonating with other eras of myself.

Part of me is leaving for college in 2004, to a part of the state that was known for nurturing national media talent. Part of me is realizing I needed to stop 12 credits short of an MBA in 2010 and move to NYC, where the kind of jobs and life I really wanted existed. Part of me is going straight from the job I was leaving that day to pick up new business cards in 2015, cards that said “co-founder” on them for the first time.

Part of me is announcing I’m exiting that company nine months ago, and allowing myself to stay away from SXSW - just this once, away from what would have been my 10th visit - partly to not distract from my business partner’s meaningful work there, but largely to let myself breathe for once and observe the boundaries of my life in new ways.

And part of me is booking a flight yesterday to SXSW 2025 in March, an intentional and punctuated answer to a question I’d asked myself nine months ago.

The question was never about whether I still wanted to see the world outside my door, but about how I wanted to see it. 

And ultimately, I am seeing it as I always have - in service of an endless compulsion toward creative energy and accomplishing things bigger than myself, but perhaps with more flexibility to see other parts of life my own way with deeper learnings as I go along. I’ll tell you more about the shape of my SXSW trip, in a client-minded way, another time. (Minor spoiler: I’ve never planned to stay for this much of SXSW in one go.)

In every incarnation of myself, I’ve had a moment where I’ve recognized the outline of a box I was in. And from there, I’ve reached a point where I had to push at the walls of it until they burst. A box is not definitionally a bad thing to me - as a songwriter also, one thing you learn early is that it can be ideal to work within chosen confines - but I would describe myself as naturally given to resetting my container periodically.

So as I head into the start of next year, I don’t wish to come from a self-aggrandizing place, or imply that my journey has been somehow superior to anyone else’s. This isn’t about shedding light on my achievements. (That’s for the next issue - Ed.)

I’m not going to tell you this year was easy; my dad’s increasing need for a cane to walk is proof all by itself that it was not. And I certainly have benefitted from privilege in many ways, in every version of me. 

But with all of that being said, I wish that all of you have an opportunity at the clarity of vision I’ve found for myself this year, including recognizing the parts you don’t have all figured out yet and accepting them, which I also have.

I’m sure I’ll tell you about those parts as they snap into focus, too.

Most of all, I wish you the chance to tell a narrative that’s kind to every version of yourself in 2025, one that recognizes where you’ve been and everywhere you’ll yet go. You don’t have to tell it to me, or even put it in your marketing plan. All you really have to do is start by telling it to yourself, the way I did when I was 5 and just wanted to go see the orchestra one day.

One Thing You Can Use Today

It's New Year's Eve. Go count this year down and spend time with your people.

2024 Albums of the Year

Disclosure: I worked on #9! #4 and #6 were previous Track of the Week highlights. That section will return next week.

1. Fontaines DC - Romance (XL)

2. Kendrick Lamar - GNX (pgLang/Interscope)

3. Future Islands - People Who Aren’t There Anymore (4AD)

4. Nox Novacula - Feed The Fire (Artoffact) 

5. Charli XCX - brat (Atlantic)

6. Grin - Hush (TLD)

7. Nemahsis - Verbathim (Self-released)

8. Geordie Greep - The New Sound (Rough Trade)

9. Chalk - Conditions II [EP] (Nice Swan)

10. Pyrrhon - Exhaust (Willowtip)

Honorable mentions:
Oranssi Pazuzu - Muuntautuja (Nuclear Blast)
Professional Extra - Onto Something… [EP] (Self-released)

List of Clubs

I'm back in NYC next week. For now, we'll skip this. If you're there, please get a little rowdy for me.

Thanks for reading! And now, a (circa-2004) image of me in the club…

The Club List is a newsletter from MeInTheClub.com. All issues are available at TheClubList.net. To inquire about marketing services for your work, contact [email protected] and include "Services” in the subject line.