The Letter Newsletter

A letter from Lucy on what's next for Midnight Voice Memos.

Hi everyone,

Had you noticed it’s been a while? I wonder. It has though. It has been some time since I sent a Midnight Voice Memos newsletter, either Song Club or The Midnight.

Truthfully, I didn’t mean to stop for this long. I just did one week and I haven’t known how to start again. I haven’t had anything I wanted to say.

While no newsletters have been sent out, I have been thinking about Midnight Voice Memos. I’ve been thinking about what it is, and what I wanted it to be—what I want it to be.

Originally, I imagined Midnight Voice Memos as abstract creative advice in collage form. I couldn’t find any songwriting content that sparked my interest online and I wanted to make something beautiful and mysterious that folks might want to really dig in and rifle through.

I don’t believe that Midnight Voice Memos is NOT that. But I also don’t believe it is. Not quite how I envisaged it anyhow.

Last month, I read How To Build The Good Internet from Matt Klein’s Zine. It exploded my imagination when via it I discovered the Tiny Awards, and remembered a time when using the internet meant, for me, checking a bunch of small sites (from Post Secret to Television Without Pity) or sifting through music blogs for interesting new stuff to download.

Recently, A Gen Z-er asked me if the internet of 2005 (which is approximately the time I’m describing above) was as idyllic as they’d been lead to believe. I had to say yes. It totally was. I miss that internet.

Also recently, I’ve been reading Liz Pelly’s Mood Machine. TL;DR it will make you resent the music industry and question the commercialization of music in any capacity.

Between these two ideas and, frankly, the current era/state of techno-fascist surveillance, I’ve been questioning how I want to share the things I make.

I feel like a sucker making beautiful Midnight Voice Memos content for Instagram in order to build an audience that’s captured there and largely doesn’t see my posts.

Over here on Substack, I’m having moral qualms too. It’s no particular secret that very questionable creators stay platformed here. This makes it an ecosystem I feel pretty rotten existing within, let alone contributing to.

All this leaves me with a sense that Midnight Voice Memos needs to disappear into the mountains for a season and shape-shift a little.

I need to spend time thinking about what platforms I want to be a part of and how I want to use them. I need to do the work of rebuilding the Midnight Voice Memos ecosystem. This means time, and a break.

I’ve paused paid subscriptions indefinitely, so if you’re one of my handful of paid subscribers: thank you! You’re free for now. I’m also working to make all paid content in the archive free.

I’m going to return in the fall with a new approach, new ecosystem, new publishing schedule, new idk what.

NEW STUFF ALL ROUND!

It’s going to be weirder. It’s going to be wilder. It’s going to be truer.

Love,
Lucy