Hey everyone — I started The Soundcheck, my weekly Sunday newsletter, because I wanted somewhere to talk about gigs that wasn't Instagram. Somewhere that didn't reward volume or trick me into chasing metrics. Somewhere I could actually think for more than thirty seconds at a time. It's been going out every Sunday without exception, and there are 326 people on it now — a number that honestly blows me away every week.
People sometimes ask me why I bother writing a newsletter when I already post on five platforms. The honest answer has three parts.
1. Algorithms rent your audience. A newsletter owns it.
Every musician I know has had the rug pulled by a platform at least once. Reach on Facebook collapsing overnight. Instagram quietly deprioritising single-image posts. TikTok getting banned in half the countries you cared about. The thing all of these have in common is that you do not own the audience — the platform does, and they can change the deal whenever they like.
An email list is the opposite. If I lost my Instagram tomorrow, I would still have my newsletter list. If I took a month off socials, those 326 people would still get my next Sunday email. That is not a small thing — that is the difference between having an audience and renting one.
2. Writing weekly keeps me honest about how the week actually went
When you are gigging four to six nights a week, it is genuinely easy to lose track of what happened. Friday blurs into Saturday blurs into the van ride home. Sitting down on a Sunday afternoon and writing a paragraph about each gig — who was in the room, what song landed hardest, what I would do differently — is basically the only reflection tool I have that actually works. If I skipped a week, I would lose the whole week.
That is worth the hour it takes to write, even if nobody read it.
3. The songs get better when I have to explain them
Here is the sneaky benefit nobody tells you about. Writing about the songs I play, every week, forces me to actually think about why I play them. Why does Hazard work as a cover? Why does Can't Help Falling In Love outperform Perfect on quiet nights? Why did Fast Car suddenly become the most-requested song of 2026?
The answers to those questions make me a better gigging musician. If I had not had to write them down, I would have noticed the patterns a lot slower. Writing a weekly newsletter is basically a forcing function for paying attention — and paying attention is 90% of this job.
The week I had nothing to say
A few months back I had a week where nothing really happened. One gig cancelled, two went fine but were not memorable, no stories, no moments. I sat down on Sunday and seriously considered skipping the week. Then I wrote it anyway — a short note about how some weeks are just ordinary, and the ordinary weeks are actually most of this job. It got more replies than any email I had sent for weeks.
People do not want heroics every week. They want honesty.
That's the whole thing.
The Soundcheck goes out every Sunday at 5pm. It's free. No spam, no ads, no "buy my course". Just the gig diary and whatever I'm thinking about. Sign up at the bottom of the homepage.
See you out there ❤️