Looking for the b-side: critical essays, music and film criticism, and the state of New Jersey

Welcome to B-Side Collection, a newsletter by me, John Bazley. If you don’t know me, I’m an essayist from New Jersey. I wrote album reviews for places like Substream Magazine,Alt Press, and Under The Gun Review for most of the 2010s. I’ve also written essays about music and the state of New Jersey for places like Catapult and The Asbury Park Press in recent years. I have an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and I teach at Monmouth University.

I’ve been working on a book for the past few years. The current draft is called Ghosts On The Boardwalk Keep You Company, and it’s about the intersection of music and home. I’m starting this newsletter because not everything I write has a home there. Like the B-sides to your favorite albums, the essays you’ll read here don’t quite fit in the current project, but I still think they’re good enough to publish. Some of my favorite songs are B-sides. I hope these essays will meet that standard.

I’m going to publish a new essay every other Thursday. The first one is about The Menzingers’ On The Impossible Past and nostalgia, and it’ll be out shortly after I publish this. The second entry is about Future’s DS2. In the coming weeks, I plan to write about Phoebe Bridgers’ Punisher, a couple of movies, and some very New Jersey-specific topics that I don’t think I could convince an editor to publish in a million years. 

This newsletter is free because I’ll die before I make someone pay for my writing. But I’m also currently out of work due to the pandemic, so if you like what you read and you want to support me, I’m happily accepting tips. My Venmo is @johnbazley and my Cash App is $bazley. I’ve also enabled the option to pay for B-Side Collection via Substack, but please know that this entire newsletter is free for everyone and I don’t expect anyone to pay.

You can subscribe at the link below. Thank you, as always, for reading my work and making me believe that I can do this.