- The Club List
- Posts
- The Club List, Issue #45: Time, As The Medium
The Club List, Issue #45: Time, As The Medium
Kodi McKinney
August 22, 2025
Welcome back to The Club List, a newsletter about making a business out of what you love.
Please vote for my talk in SXSW’s PanelPicker before it closes on Sunday! To vote for “Digital Dopamine: The Science Behind Modern Music Marketing,” you need a free SXSW account. Once you have that, it takes 10 seconds - just click the heart next to the title! I’ll be joined on this panel by leaders at Brainchild, KiTBetter, and SET who are all doing advanced things in the music tech space as we speak.
Also, please send me your panel if you have one up for SXSW voting. There are 1,000+ entries, and I don’t want to miss voting for yours!
In today’s newsletter, we’ll get into how art - and the static parts of life itself - will always change with time as time paints it in new ways. For a spicier dose of marketing’s secret sauce than usual, skip straight to One Thing You Can Use Today.
Ads From Businesses You Can Trust:
Time, As The Medium
I think a fair amount about how part of the magic of art - any art - is the effect context has upon it. How a snapshot of inspiration, creativity from a moment, changes rapidly in its emotional impact as time’s flow moves around it.
I see that in life a lot lately, just as much as in creative output. I see it in how Williamsburg has changed so drastically from when I first moved to New York 15 years ago in August 2010, with the ghosts of old practice spaces and long-gone DIY show spots thrown in relief by a 24-hour diner that got its grand reboot and one particular dive (The Commodore) that somehow has barely aged a day. The neighborhood’s spirit is inherently different, like the souls of its inhabitants and their class standing in life, but those reflections of my early days in music still remain.
I saw it also in celebrating my old agency Marauder’s 10th anniversary at their office this week, in a common space I’d taken so many meetings in and by a desk setup in which I’d put so much of myself into building something special - and I remembered feeling what I wanted to build for my future change away from the company I’d founded, into something else. I highly recommend noticing those moments of contextual overlap in life, like a time pocket where 2015 and 2022 and 2025 all exist together. You’ll notice that whenever you return home, too. One gets to create a few homes in life, with a little luck.
And remarkably, I somehow feel it most strongly now as I listen to a particular Mastodon record, in the wake of founding guitarist/vocalist/songwriter Brent Hinds’ tragic passing in a motorcycle accident on Wednesday night. He was 51, not particularly young but certainly not old.
There have been many notable famous artists whose passing affected me in some way over the last few years. David Bowie, for one. John Prine also, who I didn’t really listen to until after his death, and the joke was fully on me there because he was amazing. Ozzy Osbourne, last month. David Lynch, at the start of this year. The list goes on.
The tough part about loving creators is that you will outlive many of them, and you will find new things in their work after they go, no matter what.
But here’s the thing about Brent Hinds.
Unlike everyone I just mentioned, I not only had met him through working with Mastodon (on radio promo for The Hunter and Once More Round the Sun), but I’d had a world of connections to people who really knew him. And over and over, their stories pointed to him being a fascinating, wild, big-hearted character of a human who was sometimes such an outsized force in their tales that it didn’t seem real. He didn’t have the typical rockstar thing per se, so much as this unbridled spirit that seemed to need music to tame it.
The only time I met him in 2012, I thought to myself, I have got to have whiskey with this guy. So, I tried to get him and the rest of Mastodon to come to Idle Hands Bar in the East Village, which was where a lot of the rock industry at the time all loved to hang out. “They have over 100 different whiskies!” I said to him backstage after a show at Roseland Ballroom.
His response? A gleam of mischief in his eye. A huge smile.
“That’s like one for everybody here!”
He never made it to Idle Hands that night, which was wise of their tour manager at the time; Brann Dailor and Bill Kelliher did wind up doing shots with me at one point, which was a fun peak tale from my promo days that I tell often. But there was that little hint of the feral man in Brent in that brief exchange, a hint you’ve seen if you’ve hung out with real redneck types and rockers in certain parts of the countryside, or grew up with them how I did. I knew intuitively that if I ever saw him by a bonfire with beers in our hands, it’d be an infamous night.
So, impressions catch up now to the present day. Brent Hinds’ Harley-Davidson struck an SUV that failed to yield, and he died at the scene of the accident. It happened a block from a school in Atlanta, where two recent artist clients of mine are about to graduate; their family counted him as a friend. Mastodon’s former project manager at Reprise reached out to me about it. Many friends have been publicly sharing deeply personal stories about him. For the first time in my life, a popular rock musician’s death feels to have come from my peer group.
Mastodon has always had a rare “dudes next door” approachability given their fame, and the music industry that worked with them had a love for the guys that you don’t see very often. They were successful by the time I got to them, but they saw people as equals, and it made them easy to fight for. Brent Hinds was known to be their wild card, but he was also an artist’s artist in many ways with a unique perspective and approach to music. He was a formidable and unpredictable songwriter, and then there was his guitar technique: high-gravity metal riffs and leads laden with country-style hybrid picking, creating a rare combination of dazzle and weight that made Mastodon instantly fresh from the second they arrived in 2000.
25 years later, I find myself with their 2017 EP Cold Dark Place on repeat, late into the night; it’s the last record of theirs that’s driven heavily by Hinds’ vision, and it shows. And the context of time has had an incredible effect on it.
Initially, its four tracks were intended for a solo record, created during sessions for Mastodon’s previous two albums. It’s credited to the full band, but the Southern roots of Mastodon are so firmly on display that no one can doubt Hinds did most of the steering. Unlike any other Mastodon record, it would be reasonable to describe it as Southern Gothic first and metal second. You can dance to it, but you might have to be under the moonlight in a field first with the engine of your truck idling on the side of the road. Hinds doesn’t just play guitar on it, but also - in a nearly unheard-of choice for a metal musician - a 13-string pedal steel that integrates itself into his style as if it were always there.
Cold Dark Place, on listening to it now, tells stories of vague yearning and pain with some intrigue about whether existence remains on the other side of a 3am drive. Hinds described its title at the time to Loudwire as “basically myself” and said the record’s concept was “living and how much it hurts.” That’s undeniably a sensation you will feel here.
But in the context of a world where its primary songwriter has just left us, Cold Dark Place is suddenly like an artistic final statement from Hinds, even though he kept making music for 8 years after its release (including one final album with Mastodon, 2021’s Hushed and Grim). Not in a hopeless way, or in a way where pain is all that is there to find. More than that is present, as there is more in all of life, as memories enter and change the same space over and over again. Here in 2025, those four songs are like a door to a liminal space between here and the beyond - and while that may not have been the intent of their chief maker, there’s no doubt to me that Hinds had enough vision to consider all the hard parts of living at once.
It’s a gift that great art changes in meaning with age and context, despite being a static entity. Try and tell me it isn’t magic, that those who make meaningful art will eventually be outlived by it.
And then, as you note that, consider that life itself is an art all of its own, like an ever-changing painting. I’m certain Brent Hinds was an artist in that sense too, as he will still be one in 2030, 2050, and other years not yet available to calendars.
One Thing You Can Use Today
Want an easy cheat code to growing your creative business? One you should hear now, from someone who probably isn’t in a service provider relationship with you, before you become the client of other people?
Do everything you can to be a pleasure to deal with.
This isn’t just a matter of being calm and reliable under pressure. I have sometimes managed this so well that it’s made colleagues actively uncomfortable, but I find it best to process stress by being as in-the-moment as I can - which has a way of diminishing anxiety, a thing that feeds upon tomorrow’s uncertainty. That is its own skill. Acting nervous to reassure nervous people that you’re working hard is a trap, one I could devote a separate newsletter to.
This point is more about cultivating a sense of ease in the people who work with you, who invest time, cash, and/or sweat into your success.
There are many brilliant creative people in this world who get stuck in their journey, and as an outside observer, you can’t tell why they’re stuck. Sometimes, it’s that they’re so tricky to deal with that they don’t keep a team around them for very long. And conversely, some get wildly far with a fraction of the tools.
If all the most-talented artists were the ones who succeeded, the history of recorded music would look very different. If every founder’s success was because they had the most innovative products, the Fortune 500 would also look very different.
What have professionals in creative fields seen over and over again? Intelligence, no matter how smart you are. Ability, no matter how much you have. Conceit, derived from these things. Pride. These things do not make you special, I promise you this.
What do professionals not see nearly as often? Composure. Tact. Self-assuredness that isn’t worn as armor. A drive to put good energy into the world. Willingness to lose an argument, but win a heart. A person who can work within chaos without adding that chaos themselves.
I’m not saying “be a pushover” or “be a people-pleaser,” because being in business for yourself requires a backbone and a good grasp of appropriate boundaries. But what you have to keep in mind is that the people you will work with at any point have their own stuff going on, and being capable of de-centering yourself is an important gift to their ability to help you.
When you’re the opposite of this person, news travels fast, no matter how great your work is. Everyone will see your ceiling.
When you’re great to deal with, people will want to work with you, even if they like your work more than love it. They’ll fall for your potential.
It sounds insanely simple, but I’ve seen this prove itself true over and over again. Remember this well.
Track of the Week
Mastodon - “Cold Dark Place”
No further explanation needed.
Thanks for reading! And now, an image of me in the club…
