There's a trend I keep seeing, "what r u doing reading," and it comes in a few flavors. Sometimes it's people filming themselves reading physical books and pretending to be shocked that the algorithm served them something with actual text in it. Sometimes it's the self-deprecating version: "you're reading this instead of going outside, we're both the problem." And sometimes it's genuinely sweet, people confessing they got all the way to the end of something long and it felt like finding a room in a house they thought they knew.
I post about it on @vixenraefr because the whole conversation fascinates me. We're told constantly that nobody reads anymore. That the attention span is dead. That long-form content is for the elderly and the extremely niche. And yet people ARE reading. They're reading comment sections that are ten times longer than any article. They're reading fan theories and Reddit threads at 2am. They're reading lyrics, oh, they are very much reading lyrics, I know this because people have been DMing me specific lines from HEATHEN HYMNS and asking what I meant and I have been crying happy tears about it for two months.
So here's what I actually want to talk about today, with you, the person who is currently reading this in a world where "nobody reads." Why I'm still writing long-form. And what it is I think we're doing when we sit down and actually read something together.
The myth of the dead attention span
I don't believe human attention spans have actually gotten shorter. I think we've gotten extremely good at identifying when something isn't worth our time, and we bail faster. That's not deficit. That's efficiency. The bar for holding our attention has gotten higher, not our capacity for attention.
Think about it. You'll watch a three-hour movie if it earns those three hours. You'll read a thousand-page book if it's the right book. You'll go down a YouTube rabbit hole at midnight that technically lasts two hours and consists of thirty-seven short videos, which adds up to more total viewing time than most feature films. The attention is there. The tolerance for things that waste it is just gone. And that's fair. There's too much content, too many people demanding your time, too many videos that are four minutes long when they could be ninety seconds.
What I try to do with these posts, what I've tried to do from the beginning, back when I was first building this site while finishing the record and thinking nobody was reading yet, is only write when I actually have something to say. Not just to post. Not to hit a content schedule. When there's a real thought that needs more than thirty seconds, when the TikTok trend I'm riffing on connects to something I've been sitting with, when I owe you more than a caption.
You can feel the difference when you're reading something that earned its length versus something that's padded. I can feel it when I'm writing. The second I start adding words to hit a page count instead of to say something true, the whole thing goes dead. You feel it too. That's when you bail, and you should.
Why I write in a video-first world
I'm a musician. I live in audio. I make things for your ears and that's my primary art form and I am in no way abandoning it. But there has always been something writing can do that songs can't, and I figured that out early.
A song does something to you emotionally before you've consciously processed what's happening. That's what makes it powerful. The immediate gut hit, the melody landing before the meaning does, the way a chorus can make you feel something you don't have words for yet. That is the magic of music and I never want to stop chasing it.
But a blog post, a long one, a real one, can walk you through the reasoning. It can show its work. It can say: here's the thing I'm thinking about, here's why it matters, here's the corner I got backed into, here's how I got out. Songs don't have the space for that. A three-minute track can land the emotional truth, it can't always carry the full argument.
When I was in the thick of losing my faith, the reading, the questioning, the slow falling apart of everything I thought I knew, I needed both. Music that felt like what I was feeling. And essays and books and long-form writing that could walk me through what I was thinking. They're different tools. I still need both. I think a lot of you do too, which is maybe why you're here.
what I think reading actually does
There's something that happens in the middle of a long piece of writing, and I notice this when I'm reading, not just writing, where you forget the format entirely. You're not reading a blog post. You're just in a conversation with someone. The words stop being words and start being a voice in your head that isn't your own, and for a few minutes you're inside someone else's thinking.
I find that genuinely miraculous. That a person can sit down and put marks on a screen and another person across the internet, maybe across the world, can have the experience of being in that first person's head. That's intimacy at a scale we don't have good language for. It's stranger and closer than video in some ways. Video shows you what someone looks like. Writing shows you what someone thinks like.
People have been telling me, since HEATHEN HYMNS came out, that the album made them feel seen. Not just the songs, though yes, the songs, thank you, I'm not over that and I don't think I will be, but also the posts. The essays. The things I wrote while I was making it. Someone sent me a message last week that said: "I grew up in the same kind of church you did and I thought I was the only one who noticed those things. Your writing told me I wasn't." I screenshot that. It's on my phone. I look at it when I'm having a bad creative day.
That's what writing does that a follower count can't measure. It creates specific, particular recognition. The feeling of being the exact person someone was writing for, even when they didn't know you existed. That feeling is why I read. It's why I write. It's why I don't care that "long-form is dead."
The people who read vs. the algorithm that doesn't
My videos perform better than my posts, metrics-wise. Just true. A sixty-second TikTok will always get more views than a fifteen-hundred-word essay. The algorithm is not subtle about what it prefers. Reach, impressions, engagement rate, videos win.
But the messages I get about the writing are different. They're longer. They're more specific. They're from people who clearly went somewhere real inside the text and came out the other side with something to say. The person who watched my TikTok might follow me and watch the next one. The person who read a full post often comes back and reads more. The relationship is different. The depth is different. I'm not saying one is better than the other, I like both for what they are, but they're doing different things.
I will never chase the algorithm into writing short. Some things don't fit in short. The real stuff, faith, doubt, what it cost to make the record, why bisexuality is still treated like a punchline, how I got from "front-row church girl" to "atheist with tattoos making an album called HEATHEN HYMNS," none of that fits in sixty seconds. It doesn't even fit in six minutes. It needs room to breathe. It needs you to actually stay.
a love letter to people who stay
So. You're here. You made it this far, which, depending on how quickly you read, is several minutes into a piece of writing that the entire internet told you was an obsolete format. I'm not going to pretend I don't notice that. I notice every time.
I write these for the people who stay. Not to rank on search engines, not to perform the appearance of depth, not because some content strategy document told me to mix in long-form. I write them because I have things I need to think through out loud, and doing that in public, with you reading alongside me, makes the thinking better. It makes it accountable. It makes it feel like it matters, which is the only feeling worth chasing.
You are not a niche. You are not a dying demographic. You're a person who reads, which means you're someone who believes ideas are worth sitting with. I am so glad you exist. I am so glad you wander in here.
There's more coming. More posts, more music, more of this record living in the world and finding the people it was made for. If you're the kind of person who reads long essays on a musician's blog, hi. You're exactly who I had in mind. Stay as long as you want. I'm going to keep writing.
Love you. Now go touch grass. Or don't. Read something else. Either is valid. You're doing great.