About Crucial Tracks
Whether it's interesting interviews, album reviews, or our amazing community, Crucial Tracks is here to help you think about the role music plays in your life.
There are points in your life that are defined by music. Whether it’s a song that introduced you to a genre of music that changed the direction of your tastes and style, or a lyric that made you think about the world in a different way. Songs represent relationships. Songs trigger memories. These are all crucial tracks.
This site will dig into those tracks through interviews with people of all walks of life. Learn about the songs that made them who they are today and then listen along to playlists published on Spotify and Apple Music.
In addition to the Crucial Tracks featured interviews, you can expect the following:
- Weekly or bi-weekly new release features (Crucial Releases) – the new records I am digging
- End of year “best of” features, where I share my favorite records from the year
- Other music related content, like Operation Mainstream, where I dig into lists from other publications to explore albums I’m not familiar with… or Crucial Playlists, where I take a look at an artists discography and build out a playlist of my favorite songs.
- Plus band photos, videos & more!
-> How to participate in our Crucial Tracks interview series.
How to Follow Along
The simplest way is to subscribe to our newsletter and get regular updates directly in your inbox. (We send our newsletters no more than once a week, so they include a summary of what was posted recently, as well as any newsletter-only content.)
If you want to follow along in real time:
- subscribing via RSS
- Bluesky (@crucialtracks.org)
- Mastodon (@crucialtracks@mastodon.social)
This will get you more frequent updates, links, discussions, etc.
Regardless of how you do it, subscribe today! Never miss an update. Never miss a crucial track.
How to Support Crucial Tracks
I’ve written up a guide on how to best support Crucial Tracks.
Meet the Team
Jason Dettbarn is a UX/UI designer based in Buffalo, NY. His life with music involves attending hundreds of concerts, taking photos of bands for over 30 years, and putting on basement and club shows during his college years. During the early pandemic he wrote a series called One Last Wish, where he wrote about an impactful album from every year of his life from elementary school through high school – that series inspired this very site. He also publishes a song-a-day playlist on Apple Music that acts as an amazing musical diary, as well as an annual round up of his favorite albums.