Alex Rawls

Alex Rawls is a journalist who has been covering music and popular culture for national and local outlets since the 1980s. He served as music editor at Gambit Weekly from 2004 to 2005, edited OffBeat from 2006 to 2012, and he created MySpiltMilk.com in 2012 to create a platform for more contemplative discourse on music and culture in New Orleans. In 2018, he also ventured into podcasting when he created “Twelve Songs of Christmas,” which talks to musicians about the way Christmas music fits into their personal, musical, and professional lives. He has also contributed to The New Orleans Advocate, The Times-Picayune, New Orleans, New York Times, Rolling Stone, Spin, No Depression, American Songwriter, Oxford American, 64 Parishes, The San Diego Tribune, The Village Voice, L.A. Weekly, and numerous alt-weeklies. He has also contributed chapters to the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities' "New Orleans & The World: 1718-2018 Tricentennial Anthology,” New Orleans Museum of Art’s book “Dario Robleto: The Pre-Life of the Blues,” and Arizona State University’s "The Eighth Day: The Transgenic Art Of Eduardo Kac."

He writes as a way of processing cultural products and the ways he interacts with them. His goal when writing is to make readers better participants in the cultural dialogue by giving them new questions or perspectives to consider when they think about their own relationships to them. As a teacher, he enjoys encouraging students to start thinking about music from different perspectives including how it fits into the marketplace. Many artists—musicians included—get into their field to avoid the business world, when the truth is that musicians need to think seriously about the business if they want their music to reach an audience.

He teaches Writing for the Music Industry.