Photo by Zack Smith
“What is it like to go into a studio in June and bang out a dozen Christmas songs?”
Alex Rawls was thinking aloud about what he would ask Johnny Mathis.
“The two songs people know Johnny Mathis for—‘Chances Are’ and ‘Marshmallow World’—what does it mean that your Christmas song is how people know you?”
This is not just idle coffee shop conversation. Rawls is a music critic—with an apparent peccadillo for Christmas songs—who had just booked an interview with Mathis to talk about his new album. The write-up on Mathis would appear on MySpiltMilk.com, the website that Rawls runs to explore the music he loves.
“What I want to know is how people do it,” said Rawls. “I think the interesting part of making art, on the one hand, it is a more normal thing to do than we think about. Our culture tends to treat artists like they are magicians, [but] the questions artists are thinking about are practical ones. The nuts and bolts of it, how you get from point A to point B, really interests me.”
Rawls began his music journalism career as a kid in Ontario, Canada in 1978: “A friend and I did a school newspaper mainly about music, and I’m sure it was terrible.” He later became involved in college radio while studying at McMaster University, writing about music for the school’s newspaper, The Silhouette.
“The first time someone wanted to punch me out was when The Who was playing their first final concert after Keith Moon had died. They were playing at Maple Leaf Gardens. I wrote a lengthy piece essentially saying that they hadn’t made a record in years. I did the math and pointed out that Quadrophenia had two discs of old material, so why not just play a last gig. Someone came into the office [of The Silhouette] looking to punch me for writing that. I wasn’t in the office to take the hit.”
After finishing his undergraduate work, Rawls arrived in New Orleans in 1988 to study poetry at the graduate level at the University of New Orleans. He taught English at Delgado Community College on the West Bank until 2004 when he joined Gambit as the magazine’s music editor, a gig which lasted until Hurricane Katrina upended the city. Rawls then took a position as editor at OffBeat Magazine, which he left in 2012 to start MySpiltMilk.
“Between editing the magazine [OffBeat], the website, and the Weekly Beat newsletter, I rarely had time to write the stories I wanted to write. I couldn’t see the workload changing, so it was time to move on.” In a goodbye letter authored for his interim personal blog Smooth Jazz Superstars, he wrote, “I’m very proud of my work as an editor, but I wanted to get back to a better balance and the thing I’ve done since I reviewed a Stranglers album in the high school newspaper—write.”
Rawls landed on the name “MySpiltMilk” for his site because “it was the only one my partners couldn’t shoot down.” Subtitled “The Cream of New Orleans Music,” the site brands its music coverage with a spate of milk puns: the “Milk Run” for its weekly breakdown of interesting live shows and “Fresh Milk” for the latest music news, for instance.
Rawls’ music writing tends to focus on the cultural rather than the technical. “I can write about Wynton Marsalis because Wynton is almost always working on that line between jazz and something else, and I can find room in there to have something to say. I can’t really do anything with Branford because I need to understand saxophone history better and speak to the differences between the different players and pick up on references of other saxophone players. [Branford’s work] is so inside the vocabulary of jazz and the vocabulary of the saxophone that I know I’m not the guy to have things to say in that space.”
New Orleans music is the majority of Rawls’ beat, though he finds that nomenclature too large and loose to be useful. “Practically, ‘New Orleans music’ covers too much ground. You either have too broad a definition, which means almost nothing—music that is made in New Orleans. But I’m also reluctant to come down to any kind of essentialist definition, because as soon as anyone starts playing the ‘What is New Orleans music?’ game, you always end up showing your ass. If it’s about improvisation, does that include Rob Cambre and Donald Miller making experimental noise in [the band] The Death Posture? You end up trying to make definitions that don’t really serve a meaningful purpose.
“I know when I was freelancing at OffBeat, the emphasis that some people put on ‘New Orleans Music’ as a genre was really off-putting and excluding to people who were from New Orleans that weren’t making a version of funk-rock-jazz that derived from J&M Studios or the Nevilles on [the album] Valence Street.” On the other hand, Rawls explained that too narrowly defining what constitutes true New Orleans music creates a culturally privileged class.
“In retrospect,” Rawls said, “I understand it. There was a time that New Orleans music needed that kind of boosting, saying ‘This is our thing, and it needs to be protected.’
“While many see [Hurricane] Katrina as a hard-shift in New Orleans culture. Katrina was a stutter-step in the process. I think that in ‘03 and ‘04 there were more bands that were thinking nationally, who had aspirations outside of Orleans Parish. That process was starting. Katrina meant that a lot of musicians had to go into the world.
“It’s easy to lay a lot at Katrina’s feet, and a lot of it rightly; but I also think that the change in the Internet made a meaningful change at that point. One of the things that made New Orleans what it was was its relative isolation. The fact that it was six hours from Memphis and Houston, eight to ten [hours] from Atlanta, few connecting flights. The Internet eliminated distance. The only way to be isolated is to be off the grid. It used to be that if someone was to get signed from here, someone had to fly in from L.A. or New York to deal with it. I found out recently that a large part of Bloodshot Records signing Luke Winslow-King was partly based on a fifty-minute podcast that Luke and I did.”
Because MySpiltMilk is such a personal project, Rawls is able to insert more of his own perspective in his writing about music and culture. “I think letting people know that I do have a dog in this hunt is a valuable thing to tell,” he said. And though, because of journalistic habits and personal taste, he avoids writing in first-person, he still enjoys a non-traditional, idiosyncratic approach.
Point in fact: in 2012, Rawls posted a video of a festive march commemorating “Uncle” Lionel Batiste’s recent passing under the headline “Second Thoughts about Second Lines.” Rawls superimposed questions over the video: “Would they honor him if it didn’t involve a parade?” and an even more existential question, “What are we watching?” His simple queries generated a lengthy, substantive debate in the comments section.
Music is a conversation—between players, between the group and the audience, between the ears and the mind, between the reverberations of the past and the thump of the present—and Rawls seeks out those conversations. To Rawls and the people he speaks with, music is a thing of deep importance, and MySpiltMilk provides a venue for those conversations.
