I had managed to get myself on the mailing list for, like, every record label in existence. That was a big part of my motivation early on. Once I found out that they could send me free music I was like, “Game over, this is what I’m doing.” It was pre-file trading, pre-anything. I had so much music that I’d send out a list to writers, and I was like, “I’ll get you these CDs in exchange for you writing about them,” because CDs still carried value. Mark Richardson was one of the first people who responded to that. Amanda Petrusich, too.

It was really fun because it was about trying to be as adventurous and off-the-wall as we could be. We wanted to go against the grain of what I considered to be “professional” music journalism at that time. I knew that I wasn’t a writer, per se. I didn’t have a lot of experience but I did have a lot of opinions. I was inspired by the kind of reviews in zines where it would be partly about the music and partly about what you had for breakfast. Then I started to get submissions from actually talented writers and I’d get to the end of the review and be like, “That’s really good writing, damn!” But at the same time, I wanted to stand apart from that world, so the writing definitely reflected that.

I’m going to be obvious and say Kid A was the album of this time. “Everything in Its Right Place”: That’s the song. That opening salvo is fucking amazing, it’s like the whole mission statement of the record. It’s really hard to understate how futuristic and next-level that record was, and that a band of Radiohead’s stature would be willing to take such a massive commercial risk. Also, coming into a new millenium, it really shrugged off any sort of spectre of ’90s alt rock. It was like: This is where music’s going. And, you know, Pitchfork’s love for Radiohead is… clear. It has almost become a running joke. Our review was so over-the-top. That dwarfed our traffic from anything we previously ran, with something like 5,000 readers in a day. That had been a goal of mine for a while, to get to 5,000 readers in a day.