About the Report
This reflection was the first post on the blog back in 2019. I leave it as the description by choice to remember where my mind was when it started.
I’ve been racking my brain for a while now.
For starters, I am convinced that St Louis should be a music powerhouse. We don’t have the cleanliness or procedure of the big cities, but we more than make up for that with a creative expression that always manages to regurgitate something I haven’t heard before. St Louis is the breeding ground for some pretty out there stuff, but no one outside of the musicians seems to talk about it.
If you were an outsider going through a St Louis music publication you might think me insane after reading that first paragraph. No, outsider, I have absolutely no idea why the coverage of music in our city limits itself to almost exclusively old people playing bar music. I was an outsider myself (born and raised in Caracas, Venezuela), and being within the music in St Louis is what made me fall in love with the city, not the publications pretending to cover it. Now that you bring it up though, that narrow scope is exactly why I’m here.
I’m not a journalist or a music critic. What I am is tired. I’m tired of seeing albums I love come out and then disappear into nothingness because no one will talk about them. I’m tired of seeing artists that inspire me jump through hoops to get anyone to listen to their music. There’s something fundamentally wrong with how the St Louis music scene is promoted– I don’t know what that is exactly, but I want to put in my two cents.
The St Louis Music Report is my two cents. I will talk about the music coming out in St Louis, tell you what I think of it and hopefully give a little more exposure to all of these artists that I admire. I don’t know how much this will help and I don’t think I can fix this myself, but I’m most definitely going to try.
Staff
Editor: Julio Prato
My name is Julio Prato. I’m a musician, music teacher, producer, writer and avid listener born in Caracas, Venezuela. I came to St Louis to study Music Performance and stayed after I graduated– I started playing in the city’s DIY scene during college and immediately fell in love with the place and the community. I play guitar and sing in a band called Kids that can be found here. I also produced a large portion of the catalog in the Grownup Music label, co-founded by me and Antonio Leone. You can find those albums here. I’ve been writing about music for as long as I remember.
St Louis is home to an inspiring musical climate, and the report is my attempt to immortalize some of it. Thank you for reading!
Writer: Delia Rainey
Delia Rainey is a musician and writer from St. Louis, Missouri. She has been in the band Dubb Nubb since 2008 and also has a solo project called dee bird. She received her MFA in nonfiction from Columbia College Chicago. Her lyrical essays have been featured in DIAGRAM, Brink, and Hobart, and her music writing also appears in Post-Trash. She is the author of the chapbook CRUMBBOOK (Bottlecap Press, 2021). You can find more of her projects on her website.
The St Louis Music Report is a community service, and we accept volunteers. If you’d like to write for the St. Louis Music Report, email stlouismusicreport@gmail.com telling me why. Also include a writing sample on music writing. It could be a published article, but it can also be a couple of paragraphs you wrote on a piece of music you like.
The St Louis Music Report 