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Staff

Yancey Strickler is eMusic's Senior Director of Editorial and Features. Yancey has been with eMusic since 2004, having served as its Managing Editor and Merchandising Director. As a journalist, he has written for New York, the Village Voice, Pitchfork, Entertainment Weekly and Spin, among other publications.

eMusic editorial director J. Edward Keyes has been writing about music since 1997. His writing has appeared in Newsday, Entertainment Weekly, the Philadelphia City Paper, MAGNET and various other publications. His piece "Where's The Party? 13 Hours with the Next Franz Ferdinand" was selected for inclusion in Da Capo's Best Music Writing 2006. For two years he was a member of a one-man industrial band, about which the less said the better. The J. stands for Joe.

eMusic audiobooks editor Maris Kreizman has worked as a book editor at Counterpoint Press and at Free Press/Simon & Schuster, where she specialized in literary fiction, music, pop culture, narrative nonfiction, and memoir. She lives in a small apartment that is overrun with books, the majority of which she's actually read.

eMusic deputy editor Todd Burns graduated from The Ohio State University in December of 2003 with a degree in Art History and History. He played the french horn through high school, but doesn't claim to know anything about music other than what he likes and dislikes - which is subject to change on a daily basis.

eMusic production editor Alex Naidus is a proud New Jersey native who's been sporadically writing about music since 2001. Along with various music-related jobs and internships at places like CMJ and Insound.com, he's done everything from street canvassing for Save the Children to lifestyle marketing. He currently plays bass in NYC band The Pains of Being Pure at Heart and is one-third of faux Canadian art-punk joke legends Pillowfight. Like everyone else, he has an almost-never-updated blog about music, found at pinkyring.wordpress.com.

Columnists

Country/Folk

Keith Harris has been writing about pop music and other cultural curiosities since escaping graduate school in 1997. He's been music editor at City Pages in Minneapolis and the Chicago Reader, as well as a Senior Editor at Blender and Editor-in-Chief of Red Flag Media Publications in Philadelphia, where he currently resides. His work has appeared in Rolling Stone, Slate, Spin, and the Village Voice, in addition to many other publications, and he's grateful that rock criticism has kept him from having to go back to school so far. He blogs sporadically and sometimes furiously at Useful Noise.

Classical

Justin Davidson is the classical music and architecture critic at New York magazine. A native of Rome, Davidson worked as a stringer at the Rome bureau of the Associated Press before coming to the US to attend Harvard as a music major. While in college, he worked as a stringer for the Associated Press Boston bureau, studied classical guitar and began a career as a composer.

After spending a year on a music fellowship in Paris, Davidson moved to New York City to pursue a doctoral degree in music composition at Columbia University, where he also was instructor and later adjunct professor of music. His compositions, which have been performed in the US, Italy, China and Eastern Europe, have won him grants and awards from the American Academy/Institute of Arts and Letters, the Mellon Foundation, Meet the Composer, Columbia University and the Fondation des Etats-unis in Paris.

In 1996 he joined the Newsday staff as a classical music critic and, six years later, won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism. In 2003, he added a second beat to his brief, becoming the paper's first architecture critic.

International

Richard Gehr has been writing about international music -- and many other things -- for more than two decades. After moving to Los Angeles from Portland, OR, via Baltimore, he was the Los Angeles Reader's arts editor during the early '80s. He relocated to New York to become an editor at Spin, and wrote the magazine's "World Beat" column for a few years. He has also written for the Village Voice, Rolling Stone, the New York Times, Musician, Blender, Tracks, AARP: The Magazine and countless other publications both living and archived. In a separate but equal universe, he co-authored The Phish Book with the fab Burlington quartet. He began the current millennium as Sonicnet.com's world music editor and continues to freelance from polyethnic Brooklyn, New York, where he resides in domestic tranquility with his wife and two daughters.

Hip-Hop/R&B

Hua Hsu writes about culture and politics for Slate, the Village Voice, the Wire, the Boston Globe and various other magazines and weeklies. He grew up in California's Bay Area but currently resides in Brooklyn, New York, where he is completing his PhD in the History of American Civilization at Harvard University.

Spiritual

Michael James McGonigal has written about music since 1983, at the age of 15, when he started his own fanzine. At 19, after moving to New York City to study sculpture at NYU, he started freelance writing for the Village Voice, Artforum, Spin and other publications. Currently at work on a book about the history of gospel music called Walk Around Heaven All Day, he is also author of a book about My Bloody Valentine's Loveless. McGonigal was the Christian & Gospel editor at Amazon.com from 1998-2003.

Blues

John Morthland, who lives in Austin, is currently a writer at large for Texas Monthly and a regular contributor to various other music and general-interest publications, both print and online. He has been an associate editor of Rolling Stone and editor of Creem, and has contributed to virtually every music magazine of the past three decades; he has also written liner notes for several hundred albums and has contributed to numerous non-music daily, weekly, monthly and online publications. He is the author of The Best of Country Music (Doubleday, 1984) and the editor of Mainlines, Blood Feasts and Bad Taste: A Lester Bangs Reader (Random House, 2003). He is also the music consultant for the River Music Experience, a museum of Mississippi River music in Davenport, Iowa.

New Age

Robert Phoenix has been a postman, gardener, special-ed aid, bartender, psychonaut, Tarot reader, phone psychic and new age buyer for Rasputin’s Records. He was an editorial assistant for San Francisco Magazine, and eventually took up freelance writing for Pacific Northwest Magazine, the San Francisco Examiner, Clublife, NAPRA Review, Remix and other publications. Robert worked for Silent Records, and then ran his own mail order music business, Dangerous Dharma. He was the infamous MONDO 2000 's last music editor, interviewing the likes of Nina Hagen, Moby, David Bowie and others, while simultaneously serving as editor-in-chief of Radio-V, an online music magazine for cultural creatives. For the past four years he has worked for eMusic signing labels, guiding features and facilitating site enhancements. He currently lives in San Diego with his wife, his newly incarnated son Griffin and their familiar, Amos the Black. He believes that sound holds the key to our becoming as we are all, at our essence, bodies vibrating at the frequency of light.

Rock/Pop

Lenny Kaye is a guitarist, writer and record producer. He is a founding member of Patti Smith's band, and has worked with such varied artists as Suzanne Vega, Allen Ginsberg, Waylon Jennings, Soul Asylum, Kristin Hersh, Eugene Chadbourne, and Jim Carroll. His anthology of sixties' garage bands, Nuggets, is a landmark of the genre. In 2004, Villard/Random House published You Call It Madness: The Sensuous Song of the Croon, his impressionistic study of the romantic singers of the early 1930's.

Barney Hoskyns is Editorial Director of online library Rock's Backpages (www.rocksbackpages.com) and author of several books including the acclaimed Hotel California: The True-Life Adventures of Crosby, Stills, Nash, Young, Mitchell, Taylor, Browne, Ronstadt, Geffen, the Eagles and Their Many Friends (John Wiley & Sons). Across the Great Divide: The Band and America has been reissued in the US by Hal Leonard Books, and a study of the fourth Led Zeppelin album is included in Rodale�s new "Rock Of Ages" series.

Hoskyns lives in London and has three sons, the youngest born in the same hospital as Rufus Wainwright. Between 1996 and 1999 Hoskyns was US correspondent for MOJO. He writes for Uncut, The Observer Music Monthly and other UK publications, and has contributed to Rolling Stone, GQ, Spin and Harper's Bazaar.

Electronic

San Francisco critic Philip Sherburne has been heavily involved in the electronic-music world for the past seven years, writing for publications including the Village Voice, Slate, XLR8R, URB, Wax Poetics, Grooves, Nylon, RES, Neumu.net and many others -- including The Wire, where his "Critical Beats" column offers a monthly roundup of experimental dance music. Philip has also written on sound art and avant-garde practice for Frieze and Parkett, curated the companion CD for Leonardo Music Journal’s 2003 issue, and given talks at SFMOMA, PS1, Tate Modern and the MUTEK festival. A book chapter on classical minimalism and minimal techno is forthcoming in Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner’s Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music (Continuum Press). As a DJ, Philip holds regular nights in San Francisco, and has performed in New York, Austin, Portland, Seattle, Montreal and Barcelona.

Jazz

Kevin Whitehead is jazz critic for National Public Radio's daily show Fresh Air. His writings on music have appeared in the Chicago Sun-Times, Chicago Reader, the Village Voice, CD Review, Down Beat, the Absolute Sound and many other publications. In the '90s Whitehead spent four years in Amsterdam, where he wrote New Dutch Swing (Billboard Books), a study of improvised music in that city, and edited the oral history Bimhuis 25: Stories of Twenty-Five Years at the Bimhuis. Other books to which he's contributed include the Cartoon Music Book (2002), Jazz: The First Century (2000), the Gramophone Jazz Good CD Guide (1995, 1997) and Mixtery: a Festschrift for Anthony Braxton (1995). Whitehead is an editorial advisor and contributor to the 2001 edition of the New Grove Dictionary of Jazz. He is also a member of the improvising band Starship Beer, heard on the CD Nut Music 1976-88 (Atavistic).

Alternative/Punk

Douglas Wolk is a freelance writer who covers music, comic books, and new technology for the Village Voice, the Washington Post, Slate, Rolling Stone, Publishers Weekly, Slate and a lot of other places; his book Live at the Apollo was published by Continuum Books in August 2004. He has a weblog at http://www.lacunae.com, complete with the occasional MP3, plays bass in a couple of new wave bands and has run the tiny label Dark Beloved Cloud since 1992. He lives in Portland, OR, with the photographer Lisa Gidley, the sassy American shorthair Edie Blues Explosion Gidley, a whole lot of old 45s, and several billion dust mites.