Todd Nathanson is AKA Todd In The Shadows, an excellent YouTube creator. His in-depth videos are smart and funny, shining a spotlight on unexpected music stories. With nearly 500,000 subscribers to his channel, he’s among the biggest music-centric creators on the platform.
How did you get to where you are today, professionally?
My career path has been… complicated. I was a big fan of many film and music critics growing up (honestly maybe more than I was a fan of actual film or music) and I started reviewing movies and songs in my college paper (I was eventually editor-in-chief). I never imagined that it would pay anything so instead I got a job at a small-town paper; eventually I realized that a steadier job in “hard” journalism would never pay anything either. I quit and started pursuing a teaching degree, but I never wound up with a full-time job, partially because I was more invested in a new hobby I had developed.
“Angry” comedy reviews were popular on YouTube at the end of ‘00s; my friends and I were big fans. There were many of this type but I noticed that they mostly reviewed films and video games; music reviewers were basically absent, and I realized this was a void I could fill. Since I was still pursuing a teaching job and I didn’t want my online life to follow me around, I did all my reviews in a silhouette profile that I thought would make me stand out. I started in 2009, during a time when pop music was at its most obnoxious and overexposed, and it made for easy material for angry rants.
I joined up with a popular review site called Channel Awesome, which was very big at the time and I made a lot of contacts that have stayed with me, and I stayed with the site until it petered out over the years. Over time, I became less “angry” and more informative—I do still try to be funny though. I’ve developed two main other projects besides the Pop Song Reviews I made my name with—
One Hit Wonderland, which is about what happened to artists after their only big hit, and
Trainwreckords, about albums that ended careers.
Did you have any mentors along the way? What did they teach you?
Honestly, not really—I am entirely self-taught in this field. I have a communications degree with a music minor which taught me a lot about media criticism and music, but otherwise I had no training or experience in film production, film editing, documentaries, broadcasting, acting, or comedy. I learned it all on the job, through trial and error, and by copying other writers and YouTubers I enjoyed. The one person I would say mentored or guided me in any way is fellow YouTuber
Lindsay Ellis, who encouraged me to pursue YouTube as a full-time career, and gave me a lot of pointers early in my career (for example, instead of balancing my camera on a TV tray, I could use a tripod).
Walk me through a typical day-to-day for you right now.
I typically put out two videos a month (or just one if it’s a long episode). Sometimes I’ll get struck with a funny observation about a song and I’ll build an entire episode around one joke. Other times, I’ll find a project I find interesting and I’ll do a lot of research. I actually find writing about music extremely difficult so I’ll listen to the song or album over and over again until solid opinions start forming. I’ll also do a ton of research, sometimes books, sometimes Google, and a whole ton of YouTube, looking for clips and footage that will help fill out the video.
How has your approach to your work changed over the past few years?
My stuff is less comedic than it used to be. The One Hit Wonderland and Trainwreckords series especially have become as much documentary as criticism. I remember in 2013 during the Blurred Lines controversies that deeper criticism started becoming increasingly mainstream discourse—stuff beyond just “catchy/not catchy” but more thoughtful and informed by social justice (a trend that hasn’t slowed down at all). I remember thinking my stuff should get deeper. I also do much,
much more research than I used to. Back in the days when my videos would barely clear ten minutes, all I had to do was get overexposed to an annoying song until I built up enough material through exasperation. Now my apartment is filled with books, so many books, that I’ve used for research.
I’ve also become comfortable with doing a lot of reshoots. I used to typically just record my takes once and if I didn’t like how it sounded, oh well. Now there are a lot of post-production revisions.
Tell me how you make a video of yours, typically.
Well, I slack off for a week. Then I remember I need grocery money and I’ll try to start turning opinions into a script. After two weeks I sit down and film the entire script, and it’ll take about two or three days to edit it.
Where do you see music journalism headed?
I have no clue; I’m famously bad at predictions. If I had to guess: Nowhere good! There is still great work being produced everywhere but the chase towards SEO has decimated so many great sites like the AV Club, places where you could just be able to browse and read their vast body of work.
What would you like to see more of in music journalism right now?
Archives. This is a problem in basically all online media, music journalism included. certainly I’m grateful for
Pitchfork and I wish more sites operated like that, where you could read nearly everything they’ve ever written, easily formatted and categorized.
Billboard did a list a couple years about “100 Songs that Defined the Decade” – it was an amazing body of work that summed up the 2010s and it seems to have disappeared into the ether.
What would you like to see less of in music journalism right now?
Clickbait, native advertising.
Billboard, a publication/site I like a lot, will just publish the lyrics of a song and the article will be “Here are the lyrics to ‘All I Want for Christmas Is You.’”
Rolling Stone tweets “Here are our favorite computer monitors of 2022.” Degrading for everyone.
What’s one tip that you’d give a music journalist starting out right now that wants to use YouTube as a platform?
Learn as much as you can about the actual production side of this. Learn how to edit, learn how to record audio, learn how to deliver narration. I think most people just assume that reading your own reviews out loud is good enough, but this is a different medium and you have to use it properly.
What was the best track / video or film / book you’ve consumed in the past 12 months?
The last season of
Barry was pretty amazing! I realize this isn’t a hot take but I can’t stop thinking about it.
If you had to point folks to one thing of yours, what would it be and why?
The thing I’m most proud of recently is
a deep dive into Will Smith’s final album in 2005. It was timely, as I wrote it just after The Slap, but the record itself is shockingly revealing from a rapper not generally known for that, and I was glad to be able to uncover it, it felt like there was a new stunning development on it in every song.
Another one I really liked making was on
Liz Phair’s “Funstyle,” a truly nutsoid record that most people have probably never listened to. I did
a long retrospective on “Whoomp! There It Is” that I wish more people had seen (I talked a lot about its roots in Miami bass and strip clubs, so YouTube punished it for not being advertiser-friendly).
Anything you want to plug?
I do a fun little podcast,
“Song vs. Song,” where I pick two similar songs (“Jump” and “Jump Around,” say) and me and my pal Lina argue about which is the best one.