HeyJaredThe March Xness Substack
Essays about music, memory, and culture, especially in a March Madness-style single-elimination bracket each March.
- Indexed issues, last 90 days
- 8
- Latest publication
- Sep 7, 2026
- Audience
- Checking…
- Earliest in this view
- Jul 3, 2026
Latest issues
Labor Day Flashback: Emily Costa on Me First and the Gimme Gimmes, Cover Bands, and Connection (opens the original)
Read excerpt
Happy Labor Day to y’all Xnessers. Thought we’d send a little flashback to an extracurricular by Emily Costa circa March Faxness, our first all-covers tournament. You can read the whole essay on the site, or if you’re a paying subscriber, look at us saving you the labor and the whole click-through thing, and just read it here beyonddddd the paywalllllll.This is a good one, making a credible case for…Limp Bizkit? But even better, Me First and the Gimme Gimmes and art vs labor in music and art.Hav
A Peek Behind the Scenes for Our Writers (opens the original)
Read excerpt
Hey March Xness peeps, though we already have our first Xmas essay in (shout-out to Kathleen Rooney) and a couple extracurriculars also in hand (we’ll start running those later this month), just this morning we just sent out a note with some logistics and advice for our writers this year, nearly half of whom are first-timers in this tournament. I thought this might be a fun peek behind the curtain for you, so I’m sharing them here.<a class="image-link image2 is-viewable-img" href="https://substa
Kate Bernheimer on Joy Division vs Nicole Walker on PJ Harvey and Nick Cave (opens the original)
Read excerpt
We don’t revisit the original March Sadness tournament often. It took place a decade ago in what feels like a very different world. Way pre pandemic. Back when Twitter was fun. Wild times. One project we’ve been working on over the summer with our editorial intern Svitlana Libet is putting together a master list of all the essays we have ever published in March Xness. We’re going to pull the old tournaments out of the clunky drop-down menus and into a more accessible format, and will have a mast
End of Summer Mix + a CD for our paying subscribers (opens the original)
Read excerpt
Dear Xnessers,As we occasionally mention, The Selection Committee makes mix CDs for our mostly local friends twice a year, usually in summer and at year’s end. Our End of Summer one just dropped, and if you’d like to give it a listen, here is the youtube version and the apple music one (we don’t use spotify). This is one of the best ones we’ve done in a while, we think!<a class="image-link image2 i
And Still I Think of You (opens the original)
Read excerpt
It’s been a little bit since we sent you something from the backlist, so let’s bring back Scott Dickensheets on “Days Gone By” from March Danceness 00s Edition. It may have lost to Kate Carmody’s excellent essay on LCD Soundsystem that went pretty deep in the tournament, but it’s a great essay and we’d like to throw it back.Read it here, or if you’re one of our paying subscribers, you can do so after the break!<div class
Publishing over time
Last 90 days. Choose a month to open its work.
Recurring subjects
Named in the text we hold. One piece can cover several.
Audience
No verified audience measurement yet.
About this data
Counts cover the work we have indexed. Tone needs enough text and a confident classification. Excerpts and episode notes are not full articles or transcripts.
Identity or attribution wrong? Suggest a correction.