12 Amazing Years
– By Kyle England –
Wow! 25 years!! It’s quite the accomplishment that publisher Josh Warburton has pulled off to keep this paper running all these years and must surely be commended. It was only in its second year of publication that I picked up my very first Independent issue my freshman year at Dixie College (now Dixie State University).
I was a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed 18-year-old kid new to St. George and fresh off a one-year stint working in a record store in my hometown of Taylorsville, Utah. There were two things that struck me right off the first issue I read. One, movie critic Adam Mast knew his stuff and you could tell just how passionate and deeply his love of movies ran through every word he jotted down in his reviews. And two, music critic Kelly Patch had a wide-ranging knowledge of music and through his reviews, I was able to become educated in a lot of artists and albums I would have never heard of at the time if not for him. I thought to myself… how cool would it possibly be to one day meet these guys and express to them how much their writing impressed me?
Only a few months later I was lucky enough to meet them both at the now-defunct Tom Tom Music record store (remember that cool place?!?). I became fast friends with both Adam and Kelly almost seemingly overnight and we spent the next year plus hanging out and going to advance screenings of movies down in Mesquite, going to concerts down in Las Vegas (Pearl Jam at the MGM Grand is still one of my all-time favorite memories) and even catching screenings up in Park City for Sundance a few consecutive years.
After I moved back to the Salt Lake City area to continue work on my undergrad, Adam, Kelly, and I regularly kept in touch. It was finally around March of 2002 that Adam brought to my attention that Independent publisher Josh Warburton might be looking for new music critics. I threw my proverbial hat in the ring immediately to be considered for the critic gig, even with virtually no writing experience, but Josh must have seen something in me that I hadn’t even seen in myself and he gave me a trial run. My very first review was for Wilco’s album Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, pretty awesome stuff that my first ever album review would also turn out to be my favorite album of that decade.
It was a wonderful way to start my 12-year run as an Independent album critic. Those 12 years saw me through graduating college, getting married, getting AND beating cancer, and the birth of my first daughter. Writing for The Independent was a very special period in my life that I look back on fondly and frequently, not only because it gave me a way to express my voice and my own personal passion for music, but also the life long friendships it forged along the way and I’ll be forever grateful to Josh Warburton and The Independent for giving me the opportunity of a lifetime.
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