Jason Schneider Interview
Jason Schneider is a Canadian music historian and former assistant editor at Exclaim. He now runs the music PR company Jason Schneider Media. His latest music journalism project is The Longest Suicide: The Authorized Biography of Art Bergmann. Jason describes Art as “one of the foundational artists of the Vancouver punk scene, who went on to a critically acclaimed solo career in the ‘80s and ‘90s before dropping off the radar for many years due to various personal reasons… People often call him ‘Canada’s Lou Reed,’ although he hates that.”
How did you get to where you are today, professionally?
I grew up in a university town about an hour’s drive west of Toronto. There was a vibrant artistic scene there in the ‘80s and ‘90s, with campus radio, a rep cinema, many indie book and record stores, and several cool clubs that bands from Toronto and elsewhere played regularly. I think that’s why I connected with R.E.M. early on; it felt like my hometown had a lot in common with Athens, Georgia. There was music talk happening all the time, and the only way to keep on top of it was to read every magazine I could get. I loved Creem, and I remember getting an anniversary issue that reprinted some classic pieces by Lester Bangs and Greil Marcus. I knew from an early age that I had some writing ability, and that issue of Creem might have ultimately pushed me to try writing about music. I did a few record reviews for my high school paper, and after getting my journalism degree I started working at a local alt-weekly called id Magazine that was distributed to all the university towns in southwestern Ontario.
That was when things really kicked into gear. I was interviewing artists and writing reviews non-stop, and was encouraged by the great writers we had on staff, including Michael Barclay, who became a life-long friend. After id shut down in 1999, we both started writing more for Exclaim, Canada’s national music monthly, and completing the book we’d started with our colleague Ian Jack, Have Not Been The Same: the CanRock Renaissance 1985-1995. It was first published in 2001 by ECW Press, and was the culmination of four years of intense work that only people in their twenties can do. We wanted it to be a Canadian version of Jon Savage’s England’s Dreaming and Michael Azerrad’s Our Band Could Be Your Life, and I think we accomplished that.