Yours Truly has chosen a peculiar way to compete with the music feed: stop trying to match its speed. In a statement published May 24, 2015, journalist Frannie Kelley announced that the film collective and music publication would devote each week to one musician. A new artist would take over the site every Sunday; over the following days, Yours Truly would use reporting, portraits and film to examine that person’s work, history and character.
The schedule is only the visible part of the proposal. Kelley, whose work at NPR has centered on rap, R&B and the music business, wants the publication to enter the creative process before a finished song is reduced to a release date, a biography and a set of approved talking points. She also proposes asking musicians how they want their stories told, then helping them realize those ideas. Her launch statement presents that collaboration as a route to more informed reporting, not merely as a new packaging strategy.
That distinction will determine whether the experiment becomes journalism or unusually elaborate promotion. Access can reveal how music is actually made. It can also make a publication reluctant to contradict the people who opened the door. Yours Truly’s wager is that time, proximity and creative participation can produce a truer account without surrendering the skepticism on which reporting depends.
One subject, several forms
A one-musician week is not simply a long interview distributed in installments. Kelley’s plan allows the subject to help identify what deserves attention and how it might be documented. The cameras may follow musicians with relatives or advisers, observe solitary work, or record the unstable period before a song has a title or a future. Writing can provide history and verification while images and sound preserve details that prose would flatten.
This format could correct a familiar weakness in music profiles. Promotional campaigns tend to circulate the same condensed biography from one interview to the next. Genre descriptions become inherited facts; colorful anecdotes survive because they are memorable, not because anyone has checked them. More time gives a reporter room to locate earlier accounts, distinguish recollection from documentation and ask collaborators whether an artist’s version of events is shared.
The artist’s participation can also redirect attention toward work that ordinary publicity overlooks: an arrangement decision, an abandoned recording, a family archive or the practical relationship between musicians and producers. That is a meaningful editorial advantage. Musicians know which parts of their practice are routinely misunderstood, and treating them as thinking participants rather than supplies for a publishing schedule can open better questions.
Yet Kelley’s promise to tell the whole story should be understood as an ambition, not a literal possibility. A week remains a selection. The subject chooses what to expose, the filmmakers choose where to point, and the editor chooses what survives. A responsible package should make those choices legible instead of presenting intimacy as completeness.
The camera came before the manifesto
Yours Truly has earned the opportunity to try this because it already knows how to build encounters around music. The group formed in San Francisco at the end of 2009. Co-founder Will Abramson told DMY that he started it with filmmaker Nate Chan and designer-photographer Babak Khoshnoud. Chan had filmed Take-Away Shows for La Blogothèque; Abramson had worked at the streaming service imeem; Khoshnoud was Abramson’s longtime friend and creative collaborator. Caleb Morairty joined soon after as a writer and later became a producer. DMY’s interview with Abramson and a 2010 Wired profile agree on those roles while describing slightly different starting points.
The difference is useful rather than contradictory. Abramson identified Thao Nguyen as the first musician he and Khoshnoud filmed together before the collective formally took shape; Wired called a John Vanderslice clip the new site’s first video. By January 2010, the publication was operating as Yours Truly. Its early breakthrough arrived the following month, when the Morning Benders performed “Excuses” at Different Fur Studios with a large group of Bay Area musicians, including Vanderslice and members of Girls. The ensemble transformed the song into an event created for the camera rather than a routine reproduction of the record.
That approach distinguished Yours Truly from both conventional music videos and the most casual live-session clips. The production could look intimate without being passive. Location, guest musicians and arrangement were part of the editorial conception. Wired described a collective seeking creatively reconceived performances; when Pitchfork assembled the Altered Zones blog network in July 2010, The Guardian identified Yours Truly as its San Francisco contributor known for filming favored bands in unusual places.
The history matters because the new weekly format is not a retreat from the web. Yours Truly is keeping the web’s ability to combine film, photography, sound and text while rejecting its demand for constant replenishment. Its version of “slow” journalism is therefore a production decision: fewer subjects, more forms and a longer period of concentration.
From recording performances to initiating records
The collective moved still closer to musical creation in 2011. That January, Pitchfork reported that Yours Truly was launching a label called Love Letters Ink. The announced debut was The Wuz Here Sessions, a collaboration between Mississippi rapper-producer Big K.R.I.T. and San Francisco R&B group Grillade. The musicians revisited material from K.R.I.T.’s K.R.I.T. Wuz Here mixtape with new band arrangements and vocals. Pitchfork’s announcement also named Nite Jewel as the intended second release.
The label’s Bandcamp catalog documents what followed: The Wuz Here Sessions, How to Dress Well’s orchestral Just Once EP and Nite Jewel’s “She’s Always Watching You” release. The catalog shows Yours Truly doing more than finding existing music to film. It was commissioning arrangements, making records and managing the objects through which listeners encountered them.
Songs From Scratch extended that role. Yours Truly selected musicians and producers, brought them into studios, financed recording time with sponsor support and documented the resulting work. In November 2012, for example, the collective paired rapper Angel Haze with producer Lunice for a session at London’s Metropolis Studios that produced “Gimme That.” The FADER’s contemporary report identified earlier installments involving Joey Bada$$ and a Danny Brown–AraabMuzik collaboration.
By May 2014, the series had included Jeremih with Shlohmo, Starlito with Ryan Hemsworth, Tinashe with Jacques Greene, and Kelela and Tink with DJ Dahi. Tink and Dahi then worked together again on “Men,” an encore relationship documented by The FADER. The continuing collaboration is evidence of what Yours Truly’s intervention could accomplish: its pairing was not merely a premise for a video but a connection capable of generating additional music.
This is the essential precedent for Kelley’s new editorial model. Yours Truly is comfortable entering a room before the outcome exists. It can record false starts, interpersonal adjustments and production choices that disappear from a finished master. But it also helps create the event it covers. Its work should therefore be judged not by a fantasy of detached observation, but by how clearly it explains its own role.
The sponsor is part of the production history
Songs From Scratch also demonstrates why financial provenance belongs inside the story. Kelley’s statement says Adidas pays for the series. In the 2013 DMY interview, Abramson explained that Yours Truly did not sell conventional advertising and instead sought partners to make larger projects possible. He said the collective developed concepts, tested them and pitched them to compatible sponsors. He also said Adidas could offer creative opinions, while Yours Truly handled the series’ creation, curation and production internally.
Those are important disclosures, though they are the producer’s account rather than an independent audit of every session. Brand support does not automatically invalidate the resulting music or documentary work. It does, however, create information a reader needs: who proposed the collaboration, who financed the studio time, what visibility the sponsor received and who controlled the edit.
Yours Truly can occupy several positions in a single project—publisher, curator, producer, label and sponsored studio. Each position may produce access that an outside critic could never obtain. Each also carries a different obligation. When the collective arranges a musical pairing, it should say so. When a partner pays, the partner should be named. When a commissioned project is presented beside independent editorial work, the boundary should be unmistakable. Immersive presentation makes that clarity more necessary, not less.
Artist-led reporting still requires an editor
Kelley’s most provocative proposal is to let musicians help direct the storytelling. The benefit is evident. An artist may contribute private photographs, unfinished recordings or an account of a working method that no reporter could reconstruct from outside. The subject can identify stale narratives and explain why a widely repeated description is wrong. Collaboration may also reduce the theatrical opposition of a standard interview, in which both sides perform roles established by a publicity cycle.
The risk is equally clear. Musicians are authoritative about their intentions and experiences, but not about every historical fact, disputed business relationship or other person’s motives. Memory is selective, and public identity is part of an artist’s work. A subject’s preferred story can be revealing without being complete.
The editor’s task is therefore not to disappear. It is to separate testimony from independently established fact, add the voices of collaborators, disclose the publication’s role and preserve meaningful contradiction. If an artist directs a film or chooses the subject of a package, readers should know. If reporting does not support a remembered event, the disagreement should remain visible. Helping musicians speak in richer forms need not grant them final authority over what is true.
That is why Yours Truly’s proposal is more interesting than a general complaint about hurried online writing. It places a real journalistic tension at the center of the format. The publication wants the knowledge that comes from participation while retaining the credibility associated with independent inquiry. Neither attractive access nor a sympathetic subject can resolve that tension; only transparent, verified work can.
What the extra time must produce
Slower publication is not inherently deeper publication. A beautiful week of studio footage can still function as publicity, while a brief news item can supply facts an audience urgently needs. The meaningful question is what the extra attention buys: new context, audible insight, checked history and a clearer account of how a piece of music came into being.
Yours Truly enters this experiment with relevant experience. It has reframed live performances, released records and introduced collaborators whose work continued beyond the original session. Those projects demonstrate both the value and the complication of getting close to creation. The collective is rarely a fly on the wall; it may have helped choose the room, assemble the musicians and pay for the recording.
The one-artist week can make that involvement a strength if the publication reports through it rather than concealing it. On May 24, the outcome remains unproven, but the test is well designed: choose one musician, remain long enough to discover something that was not in the press release, and show the reader exactly how the story—and sometimes the music—was made.