The Oral History of Pigeons & Planes

Confusion: I didn’t even know what a blog was when I started Pigeons and Planes. I didn’t know what blogging was or what it meant. I used to read like 2DopeBoyz and Nah Right and random smaller blogs, but that was pretty much it. I would read them and Pitchfork and that was my basis for why I started the blog. I loved hip-hop, but I also loved indie music and the whole reason I started Pigeons and Planes was just reading those sites and realizing these places are so specific in what they cover and there should be a site that can cover some new underground rap shit and also post popular indie stuff or pop music. I had just graduated from James Madison University in Virginia, I had a degree in finance, and I started applying for jobs and hated everything I was seeing. I was going to end up taking some job that I hated, so I just wanted to do something that I liked, and that was music blogging.

I was like, 'I just started this blog, what do I do now, how do I do this?'

[In the blog's early years] it was pigeonsandplanes.blogspot.com. I had no idea what I was doing. At that point I had reached out to other bloggers. There was a thing called elbo.ws and it would take popular posts from all these random blogs, so I started following that and went through there and found a bunch of other blogs. I got contact information and I reached out to bloggers I liked. I reached out to the guys from Pretty Much Amazing, DC to BC, and We All Want Someone to Shout For. I reached out to those guys and I was like, "I just started this blog, what do I do now, how do I do this?" So I got them to help me out with technical stuff like setting things up with hosting and all these things that I had no idea how to do.

I came up with the name "Pigeons and Planes" in like 15 minutes. I knew I wanted it to be "something and something" and I wanted those words to represent two opposites—rap and indie, mainstream and underground, whatever—but that was it. And I always liked pigeons because of a Cannibal Ox song called “Pigeon.” So that was that. It meant more to me, and it's taken on even more meaning to me now, but the name itself wasn't like a long process. When I started it, I didn't tell many people. My girlfriend at the time knew about it. I didn’t even tell people about it for a while. I just did it and it was like a fun thing. It was an outlet.

I think Charles Hamilton was the first artist I blogged about. I remember very early—within the first couple months—he linked Pigeons and Planes on his site. He was just one of those dudes who was really coming up on the Internet and I was a fan of that first mixtape of his. I wouldn’t even have known about him if it wasn’t for blogs.

Ernest Baker: It’s funny, I can’t pinpoint an exact moment because the late 2008 blogosphere is like a blur to me. I started music blogging in college and I started a site called newbornrodeo.com and that used to be my old Twitter handle. And I probably picked out like 15 sites that I would follow to keep up with music myself and there were obvious ones like Nah Right and Pretty Much Amazing and a lot of the other stuff that was really popular at the time. And somehow in the midst of all that while looking at people’s different blogrolls and doing Google searches for music blogs, Pigeons and Planes came up. And I added it to my Google Reader and it’s been on my radar ever since then.

Jon Tanners: I wanted to know where to get music from and I think I saw Pigeons and Planes on a blogroll and I thought, ‘That’s a weird fucking name" and I think it was actually where I first heard Kid Cudi. And I was like, "Oh, they’re on to some things I know nothing about." So around 2009 I got hooked and have been on it ever since.

Joyce Ng: I guess I used to follow a lot of blogs, when it started to become a thing, and Pigeons and Planes was one of them that I liked. I started following it in 2009 or 2010, and I remember reading this one post that Jacob did, and it was very specifically talking about Nicki Minaj’s ass. He interrupts himself halfway. He’s writing a post about a Death Cab song, and then he’s just like, "I need to take this time to pay tribute to Nicki Minaj’s ass and seeing it live." And that's when I just figured that Pigeons was my favorite blog. It was just humorous and real; it’s got soul. It’s very interactive in that way, like P&P is a friend, and that friend is like, "Man, I saw Nicki Minaj's ass in real life today." So after that Nicki Minaj post, I followed Pigeons religiously.

JennsDrunk: I found out about Pigeons & Planes from my best friend, another girl named Jenn. She introduced me to the blog in 2009, I believe it was, because I remember what really set me off and got me reading it daily was New Year's 2010 when Jacob posted this thing when the blog was not as well known and he could still post things that were more heartfelt and personal, and he posted this really long thing about life and music and he posted it right after the new year. After I read that, I was like, "Wow, this kid’s awesome." And so that’s when I started reading the blog. I had found it before then, but that’s when i started really reading his work, his words, and everything.

All these other guys were rushing to be 'first' on stuff, and I was more concerned about the overall mix. I wasn't going to be first on anything as a new blogger with no connections in the industry, but I took pride in the fact that no other website had the mix of content that Pigeons and Planes had.

Confusion: I always liked keeping up with music and sharing it and I liked the idea that people paid attention, but for the first few months, nobody was reading it. It was like my girlfriend and my mom. I didn't care much about journalism or professionalism, it was just about the music. It was just this fun hobby, like finding music I thought was cool and curating this site. After a couple months, I got kind of obsessed with it, as I tend to do with things. I would do it every day and when I saw stuff come up on other sites, I would be like, "Alright, I need to cover this." I'm a competitive person, but I also had a different strategy. All these other guys were rushing to be "first" on shit, and I was more concerned about the overall mix. I wasn't going to be first on anything as a new blogger with no connections in the industry, but I took pride in the fact that no other website had the mix of content that Pigeons and Planes had. There was not a single site on the Internet that, in any given day, had the exact combination of posts that Pigeons & Planes had. That combination was the key. It still is the key.

Ernest: Jacob had one of the more interesting sites that I was reading at the time and he added a level of personality and personal opinion that made me care about who the person behind the blog might be and then that was compounded by the fact that he had this mysterious persona. I was starting to get legitimately involved and slightly known in the music blogging scene and I would go to New York and meet people at Complex and a lot of these online personalities. And Jacob was one of my favorite people out there and I always wondered what his story was, what his deal was. So that was when I was first trying to connect and have relationships with other people doing music blogging, I got in touch with him. I didn’t write for him, he was just another guy who had a blog trying to make something with it so we had a common thread there.

I randomly tweeted at Jacob and was like, ‘Let me be your friend.’ It wasn’t even like, ‘I wanna write for you.’ I just asked, ‘What is your name?’ Because his name [on P&P] is Confusion. - JennsDrunk

JennsDrunk: I don’t remember what it was, but I randomly tweeted at Jacob and was like, "Let me be your friend." It wasn’t even like, "I wanna write for you." I just asked, "What is your name?’" Because his name [on P&P] is Confusion, and I didn’t know anything about him. So I tweeted him, and he immediately answered and we talked back and forth for a while and he was like, ‘Write for me!’

I’d never written about music before, but I love music and I’ve always been involved. And I think like the first couple big posts I did were like—a lot of my friends are musicians so I posted my friends. I feel like I might’ve posted all my friends at first. And then kind of grew from that. I posted a lot of early Mumford and Sons cause I used to be their No. 1 fan. I would find things, because my taste was a little bit different than Jacob’s. It was more toward the pop side of things, generic pop but also the indie pop and acoustic folk stuff that he wasn’t into—there was still a lot of indie stuff there, but the stuff that fit more halfway into the mainstream is kind of what I found and liked writing about.

Brendan: I don’t know what prompted me to reach out but I emailed Jacob to see if I could write for Pigeons and Planes. I had been reading the site for a couple of years by then, probably since close to the very beginning of the site. I found it when I was still in high school and it became my favorite music site out there. I was one of the people that had actually bought a t-shirt when P&P printed their first run of them, and I still have a CD Jacob burned for me as one of his viral marketing schemes—I wrote pigeonsandplanes.com on all the whiteboards hanging on people's doors in my dorm freshman year. I was a serious P&P fan. I was in the journalism school at Northwestern and was thinking I wanted to be a music writer and writing album reviews for another blog called Pretty Much Amazing, so I guess I just kind of randomly reached out to Jacob my sophomore year and he emailed me back pretty quickly, and then I got started. That was basically it, it happened fast. I sent him a sample of songs I’d been listening to but I don’t think he ever listened to them. It was more like, "Let's see what you can do."

Jon Tanners: At the end of my senior year in college in May 2011, I pitched a piece to Jacob. I knew from following P&P avidly that Jacob was a Def Jux fan and with the Aesop Rock quote at the top of the site, I was like, "Alright." I was a huge Def Jux fan as a teenager, very unhealthily obsessed. I basically reached out because Def Jux had closed down the year before and there had been a bunch of “Best Of” lists and eulogies to Def Jux, but there wasn’t a history. I couldn’t find one on the Internet, so I pitched the complete history of Def Jux. This is May or April 2011 and Jacob was like, ‘This is a great idea, but I don’t really have a ton of time right now." So I said, "I’ll write it and you can edit it and help out with the interviews."

Sitting on my harddrive now there’s like 8,000 words waiting for interviews [for a Def Jux oral history]. - Jon Tanners

And we went back and forth for an entire year. I would email him and he wouldn’t respond, and he would email me and I wouldn’t respond. We’d go through these months of radio silence, but the whole time, I was working on this piece. Sitting on my harddrive now there’s like 8,000 words waiting for interviews. And what basically happened was by April or May of the next year it became pretty clear that there were some people who just didn’t wanna be interviewed. The goal was to create an oral history, but in the absence of that I just kept writing. We couldn’t get enough interviews and we both both kind of agreed to just table it. And at that point I just straight up asked, "Jacob, are you still looking for contributors?" I know he’d posted about that from time to time on Facebook and Twitter and I was doing not a whole lot at the time. So I was like you know what, I’ve been spending a lot of time writing, why not just ask. And he said, "Yes, but it doesn’t usually work out." And I was like, "Okay, that’s not a ringing endorsement but I’ll go with it."

Constant Gardner: Pigeons and Planes was always fun to read and and obviously back then it was a little less professional than it is now but, like everyone really, I enjoyed Jacob's ramblings—plus he seemed to have a similar taste to me. So I’d been reading the site for fun while I was at university in Bristol (in the UK) studying Politics and French, and then one post he was saying, "Oh, we always seem to be two or three months behind the UK and Europe on new music. This song has been popular for like three months in the UK, and I’ve only just heard of it blah, blah, blah." I’d done just a little bit of writing for my uni newspaper and a lot of my degree was about writing essays and expressing myself, but mainly I just thought I may as well reach out to him because I’m from the UK and I love music. So I literally just emailed him around the beginning of 2011, it was in February 2011, actually.

And it's funny to me now, but I was really nervous about reaching out and asking about contributing, it seemed like such a massive thing to me. I imagined this professional, experienced writer, and so I wrote and re-wrote this email, trying to make myself seem cool and impressive and interesting. So, and this is kind of embarrassing looking back on it now, but I sent Jacob this email and the subject line was "Polycephaly - two headedness" and happily he didn't just think I was on some dumb shit, and replied quickly. So we went back and forth from there, talking about availability, interests, getting stuff set up, and then suddenly boom, there I was, Constant Gardner, on this site that I'd been reading, and loving, for ages.

Joyce: I had been writing for my friend’s blog for a while at the time—it was some local thing from Vancouver called Lost Boys Life—and prior to Jacob actually posting on Facebook that he needed help with daily posts, I had interviewed him just to get a look into the blog world and how he got started. So we had come into contact prior to that, and then he posted on Facebook that he needed help, and I reached out, and that was it. I got on board. I’m pretty sure the first thing I ever wrote was about R.E.M. disbanding. That was the very first post, which is kind of sad. It feels so long ago.

Katie K: I had my own blog on Tumblr which had a pretty steady following. And when I started reading P&P more, it was the first time that I thought, "This is a place I'd love to get involved with and move my writing to." It had the perfect mix of humor, intelligence, and creativity. I sent them an email with a few samples and it was actually Jon who responded back. He had me do a few more samples and then I was brought on and started writing consistently for them.

Noah Callahan-Bever: Back in the summer of 2010 Rich Antoniello, the CEO of Complex, approached me because he wanted to diversify the portfolio of the media network and to get more good indie music blogs in the network. We re-launched Complex in January of 2011 and what was funny was in the fall of 2009, Rich and I had talked about the growth of Complex and what we needed to do next, and initially we had talked about launching a bunch of owned-and-operated properties to roll out starting the beginning of 2010. And at a certain point I stepped back and I felt like what we had right here was kind of snowballing and I thought we'd lose something if we tried to do that too early. I thought what we needed to do is take the website and create different channels for all the topics and that’s the way we grow the site, make each topic be its own sort of subsite.

So I hit one of the guys who worked here, Ernest Baker, and just asked him for a shortlist of places he was looking for music and he sent maybe four or five, and from that list Pigeons and Planes—there might’ve been one other one that we signed off that list—but definitely Pigeons and Planes was the best of them.

Ernest: After school, I ended up getting hired full-time by Complex and they needed bloggers that understood their infrastructure as far as signing blogs to their media network, and it just made total sense for Jacob to be someone who could get an opportunity like that. And I knew Jacob fit into that realm, so I made some recommendations at Complex and he wound up getting some meetings and stuff and he was obviously more than qualified.

People would comment and be like ‘sell out!' but to me it’s just the way it works. If you expect people to put this much time into doing something, they need to get something out of it. - Confusion

Confusion: I don’t remember who approached who. I was on MOG at one point. And I think that Complex approached me. I mean, it was mostly just that they were paying more money, they had a better network, they had a bunch of sites that I like on their network. It seemed like the right move. People would comment and be like "sell out!" but to me it’s just the way it works. If you expect people to put this much time into doing something, they need to get something out of it. This was becoming more than a hobby that I did for fun.

After a while, I saw Pigeons and Planes kind of looked old compared to all the new blogs. I just basically wanted a nice-looking website and I knew I wanted to get pigeonsandplanes.com instead of .blogspot.com and it just seemed like the next move. I hired someone and paid him like $500 to do that [design the Wordpress]. And at that point, we were advertising but not making a lot of money so that was a big investment for me, but I had no idea how to do it. So I just found some guy that said he’d done it before and he just did the whole thing.

Noah: At that point as Pigeons and Planes became more closely on my radar, I started noticing how consistent Jacob was about posting. So when we were looking for music aggregators in the spring of 2011, I was like, "Yo, we gotta talk to Jacob. I don’t know how busy he is, but if we can get him working for Complex Music as well as doing Pigeons and Planes, I think he’s like super on top of it." And then he was aggregating for us for a few months and then he came by the office a few times and I met with him and stuff and I just liked his whole demeanor and vibe. That was really sort of the earliest stages of us getting to know each other.

I had talked to Jacob and he had expressed interest in taking a full-time job at Complex at some point and we had a hire available during mid-summer of 2011. And Jacob and I spoke about it and he seemed pretty into it, I think he had just graduated college at that point. And then I went and I was talking to Rich about it and I was like, "Oh yeah, you know I think we’re gonna offer a job to Jacob from Pigeons and Planes." And he was like, "Oh, a job to do what?" And I was like, "Aggregate, he’s really good at blah, blah, blah" and he’s like, "Well, why don’t we buy the site and roll it up and hire him. If we wanna offer him a job, why don’t we offer him a job to run the site and let’s buy the site. Do you believe in it? Do you think he’s a smart guy who can grow the traffic?" And I was like, "Absolutely, I love the site I think it’s great. I think it’s small enough that there’s enormous growth potential but they’re doing all of the fundamental things right." Rich was like, "Alright, well let’s just sit down and talk to him."

It was sort of kismet; we had this moment where it was like, ‘Here’s this site that has an incredible brand, great personality, and is small enough that it’s a huge investment opportunity for us.' - Noah Callahan-Bever

So the next time Jacob came through, I don’t even know if he knew that we were interested in that, so I introduced him to Rich and I think they had met sort of in passing back when he signed into the network a year earlier. And yeah, we just kicked him the idea and he was like, "I would absolutely love to do that." It was sort of kismet; we had this moment where it was like here’s this site that has an incredible brand, great personality, and is small enough that it’s a huge investment opportunity for us and it’s not gonna break the bank, and it gives this guy and opportunity to have the best of both worlds with the security of a real job but also getting to work on the brand that he came up with.

Confusion: It was awesome for me. That’s one of the highlights because I never thought that deal was even a possibility and suddenly it was like I could actually do this as a full-time job. To be completely honest, before that happened I was in a pretty negative space. I didn't have a clue what my next step was. I had all these dreams of doing something I loved but I didn't have a way in and I didn't have time to just sit around. I had basically accepted the fact that I'd have to give up on doing something I loved and take some shitty job that I knew I'd hate. And then this happened. Leaving the office after that meeting was such a great feeling.

Ernest: Next thing I knew, Jacob was part of the team. He had a site that was kind of like immersive and special and Complex saw an opportunity to do this whole owned-and-operated thing. It was more than signing him and throwing some ads on the site, but really bringing him into the fold. I wasn't there for the meeting, but I was in the building at the time. It was pretty cool because it was just this normal guy and it all became legitimized way more.

Brendan: I was actually there for all that. I was internng at Complex when it bought P&P. Jacob had actually put me in touch with Complex for the internship. I’d been working at P&P for almost a year at the time and then I wanted a journalism internship so I knew Jacob knew more people. And then he emailed the people he knew cause we were in their media network at the time, and then I think Ernest was the person who called me and I was an intern. I moved out to New York for the summer. And then, once I was out there, suddenly Jacob and Complex are working out the details to buy the blog. We were drinking at Jacob's apartment and throwing knives at a dartboard when I heard all the details, because that's what you did at Confusion's place back then.

JennsDrunk: When Jacob told me about Complex, I was happy for him. I remember having conversations with him—we used to talk on GChat in like 2010 all the time. We knew each other a little less than a year before we met each other because I was in Los Angeles and he was in New York, and we'd talk all the time. I knew that he had so many big aspirations for Pigeons and Planes, so when I heard about Complex it was just so, so great. I was proud of him and just proud of the work that he did and put into it and the dedication. 'Cause I remember talking to him when he was in school and like on the grind and living at home and doing all that stuff, and just talking about all these things.

I didn’t just do this cause I wanna make a bunch of money off blogging. The simplest way I can say it is like this: This is helping me focus all my energy into something that I love. It’s not a bad thing. - Confusion

Confusion: It was weird because I saw people’s reactions [in the comments] like, "Oh no, you’re selling out, whatever, you’re just doing it for the money now." But it didn’t change us. Sell out? Like, do you see the shit we post? Even at Complex nobody’s told me you need to do this, you can’t do this anymore, other than a couple small things like not being able to swear in headlines anymore. It hasn’t changed the direction, it's just given us more opportunities. I still don't think people really get what it is, like Pigeons & Planes is Complex. I work in that office, I consider myself part of that team. I’ve always thought it’s better to just lay it out and let people know exactly what it is. But people still get weird about any small thing joining a bigger thing. I didn’t just do this cause I wanna make a bunch of money off blogging. The simplest way I can say it is like this: This is helping me focus all my energy into something that I love. It’s not a bad thing.

Noah: Once we applied the Complex best practices and procedures to Pigeons and Planes, we started seeing the growth immediately. I think by the end of that year, he had doubled the traffic in maybe four or five months and Brent [Rollins, Complex Art Director] did a super nice logo with the pigeon thing and we applied a redesign. And there are few things that make me more happy than seeing Brent’s redesign of the logo and giving that to Jacob and watching him get super duper excited. That was like October or November of 2011 and then, six months after that, some woman on Instagram tattooed it on her arm. What’s more gratifying than that? It’s an incredible design and then on top of that that someone would wanna commit that to their body is awesome.

Khal: I actually interviewed for the EDM site I’m doing now [Do Androids Dance] and when I got to Complex, they were like, "Yeah, you’ll be under Jacob." I was like, "Oh shit, that’s ill." Because we used to e-mail each other and, I mean, it’s one of those things where you’ve interacted with someone online for so long and then you’re finally getting to meet them face-to-face, so it was pretty cool to see it go in a cycle like that. The thought was I would go in and get my feet wet working with dance music. For me, it’s different than other writers because I was essentially being groomed to do what I’m doing now, so it was looking at the way Jacob has everything structured with Pigeons and Planes and essentially taking what I can from that model for Do Androids Dance. So trying to apply that model to dance music, it hasn’t been easy, but I learned a lot. I worked exclusively with P&P from September 2012 to the beginning of January so it was like a four-month crash course on how to get everything organized.

Constant Gardner: It’s crazy because when I started writing for P&P it was 100% totally for fun just because I enjoyed it, contributing was a nice creative outlet, it didn't seem like anything too serious.  I started off slowly just doing a few posts. Then as the site started to grow, and then things started moving quicker and quicker, I got more and more involved in it. And it sounds silly, but the site really does become a huge part of your life, and your identity. Like, if you asked any of my good friends to talk about me, Pigeons & Planes would be one of the first few things they'd mention. I certainly haven't been there from the beginning, but I've been writing for P&P long enough, getting towards three years now, and seen first hand so many of the changes and so much of the growth, that I feel so incredibly proud, but also protective, and like invested in this site. I've missed parties, and pissed off girlfriends, but it's got to the stage where my friends and exes and even parents care about the site. Like, they see what a big part of my life it is and are kind of second hand invested in it all.

Anyway, even up until very recently I didn’t think it was gonna become a full-time job. I was still in England doing my college degree, I didn’t know what I wanted to do afterwards, but I kind of slowly started to realize, as we got bigger and bigger, that actually this was more than a one-man operation and there was a possibility of a job.

As soon as it was mentioned that there was a possibility of a job, I was just like ‘YES! Definitely!’ I never thought about it. - Constant Gardner

And it’s funny because I realized when I arrived here in New York [to work as editorial assistant], that I’d never actually sat down and thought and run through the pros and cons of moving here and taking the job. That dawned on me in the cab from JFK airport to Jacob's apartment. I love writing for Pigeons and Planes, and it had become such a big part of my life and what I do that as soon as it was mentioned that there was a possibility of a job, I was just like, "YES! Definitely!" I never thought about it, I just jumped at the opportunity.

Jon: Jacob gave me a login Memorial Day Weekend of 2012 and I think the first thing I did was a post on this rapper Nacho Picasso. He’s become kind of the mascot for my weird rap listening over the past year and a half. And I was doing a post every few days. But when I really turned the corner was about two weeks after I started and Jacob shared me on this Google spreadsheet the “30 Best Underground Hip-Hop Albums.” I think to this day that’s one of the most visited posts on P&P.

I feel like that was in some ways my initiation because I remember when that went up, it was my first time really dealing with comments that were just completely insane, someone calling you an idiot because you didn’t choose some Atmosphere album over another Atmosphere album. After that, I started posting every day and doing a feature a week. The first piece I ever did that I was really proud of was about Gunplay, Odd Future, and Swastikas called “On Odd Future, Gunplay, and the Slippery Slope of Appropriation” and how they were using this imagery that people didn’t seem to be up in arms about.

 You don't see other blogs doing that sort of shit because Jacob's not the one in charge. It's being given this opportunity to express how we love music on our own terms. That's rare. I think we're all grateful for that. - Joyce

Joyce: I actually like the posts that people probably hate the most, like the ones where we do stupid stuff like Photoshop the eyebrows off musicians. But any of the “Year End” lists, they're amazing to me because they take so much work and they always come together. Jacob has given us all a lot of freedom, like allowing me to do those Action Bronson cooking posts where I actually cooked out the food references. And I think by the time this piece comes out, I’ll have done an MF DOOM food references post as well. You don't see other blogs doing that sort of shit because Jacob's not the one in charge. It's being given this opportunity to express how we love music on our own terms. That's rare. I think we're all grateful for that.

Katie K: I don't remember the specific time or place, but there was a night Jon, Jacob, and I literally stayed up until almost 5 a.m. talking about music and our favorite artists, what our first albums were, and just throwing out ridiculous feature ideas. A little inside secret: this is how a lot of our dumber ideas come together. And I remember sitting there thinking 1. We're fucking weirdos; 2. Why Jacob never has anything to mix with and we always end up drinking whiskey with some weird juice he has in his fridge; and, 3. That as common as this had become for us specifically, this situation—finding people that truly get the most bizarre, random parts of who you are and not only accept but appreciate them—is really rare in life. And when something like that hits you, you don't forget it. I think that's what makes this team and P&P and our readers so great: we toe this line of entertainment and expertise. Not many sites can post a whole gallery of musicians with dolphins and still hold up the same credibility we do. We get it, our readers get it, and it's what sets P&P apart.

Confusion: By the end of 2015, I want to have a record label. I want to get involved more with the music itself rather than just talking about it. I would love to have P&P Records and I think it would be cool if we had a festival. Maybe not huge headlining acts, but having like 20 artists. But for now we’re really just focused on growing as much as we can and creating as strong of a brand as we can create. I feel like once we have that, it’ll be easy to branch out into other things. We’re almost at that point now.

Brendan: When I first found Pigeons and Planes, I was so different. That was like four or five years ago. I wasn’t even in college yet. And it’s still something I’m so excited just to read, let alone write for. I can't imagine not being a part of this team. There are not many things that I used to do in high school that I'm still excited about today. Some old habits have changed, but this is one of the ones that has stayed the same. One of the more exciting things about being involved with the site for so long is to watch the growth. As much as I loved the early Confusion era, the site's adapted a lot, and I think become a lot better. It’s still as weird as it was since just Jacob was just writing about his fish, but as a whole it's crazy to watch the site improve and feel myself becoming a better writer along with it. It’s kind of crazy to me that it’s been around for that long.

Joyce: In a lot of ways, Pigeons and Planes has defined me and how other people define me as well, in terms of what I do, and how I think. I remember visiting Montréal after I hit up New York and met the team back in June, and my best friend was telling me how her friends were excited to hang out with me, but I was always busy blogging. I was on vacation, but I’d just always be on my laptop. It makes me feel kind of bad but it’s truly become a part of my life, where I speak to Jacob, Alex, Katie, and Jon more than I do with my actual friends. They're important to me. Is that really depressing? It happens. I mean, we’re on GChat all day so of course it’s gonna happen.

I think we were talking about Kanye, but I remember Jon wondering whether or not we've isolated ourselves on this little island—an island where these artists and their talents exist to us, and only us, and so much so that it's become our reality—because we're constantly drowned in new music. If that's actually the case, I really have no issue with that if it's with these people. As for the future, I know Jacob has thoughts about a record label, so if I could move to New York and help out with that, I would in a heartbeat.

Ernest: I think the readership of the blog should continue to increase. I know that it does and it’s pretty awesome because at this point I don’t work at Complex anymore, I don’t live in New York anymore—I live across across the country in LA, and on multiple occasions since I moved a few months ago have seen references to and discussions of Pigeons and Planes as nothing more than a great music site where they get music. For the longest, I heard about it in the Complex office in the context of like this is a site that’s a part of our operation and we’ll always work closely with it. Now, I’m completely removed from that and there’s people in my office that are spread around and they’ll have Pigeons and Planes up on their computer. They’ll talk about a new song and be like, "Yeah, check it out on Pigeons and Planes." It’s really embedded in the music consumption culture and I think Jacob and his team will take advantage of that and just continue their rise to prominence.

Jacob is the kind of person and Pigeons and Planes is the kind of thing with endless potential. And I believe in it so much. In five, ten years, I’m gonna be sitting here talking about the blog when it’s a label.  - JennsDrunk

JennsDrunk: I’ve literally seen Jacob make every single thing happen for himself that he’s wanted, which makes me very excited to see his next steps because I think that he is the kind of person and Pigeons and Planes is the kind of thing with endless potential. And I believe in it so much. In five, ten years, I’m gonna be sitting here talking about the blog when it’s a label.

Jon: I told Jacob recently that Pigeons and Planes gave me life. Through P&P, I’ve learned so many things that I wouldn’t have known about otherwise. I have expanded my musical taste. And it’s given me an outlet. Whenever I meet someone who reads P&P and they’re like, "I love it," it’s always awesome to know that someone other than my mother is reading my stuff cause before that I’d be like, "Hey Mom, here’s an essay I wrote on Rich Boy." So having that outlet for someone who likes to talk a lot is tremendous and I’m really thankful every day that I get to write for P&P. Who knows how impactful this stuff is, because the world is so fragmented, but I know that we’ve written stuff that people who I respect and have looked up to for years have seen. That always is this unbelievable revelation for me.

And I told Jacob I want to keep writing for P&P as long as it exists. I just love the environment and I don’t know that I would enjoy the experience as much at an outlet that didn’t have the same vibe as P&P. This is always home for me. It’s something I associate very closely with my own personal growth over the past year and half and it’s something I’m so proud of. So as long as I don’t get voted off the island by the rest of the P&P staff, I see myself continuing on with it because it’s love.

Katie K: Jacob has this quote he loves, it's from this Tupac documentary, and Tupac says, "I'm not saying I'm gonna change the world, but I guarantee that I will spark the brain that will change the world." And we're not going to change the world with Pigeons & Planes, I don't think any music blogger would say that. But the idea that we are still one of the few places that posts unknown artists, a blog that still listens to every submission and cares deeply about music, and gives people a chance that bigger outlets would overlook, I don't know... I think there's something really inspiring about that.

The way that Jacob has very carefully grown the breadth and depth of the coverage at the same time has been seamless and very purposeful. And he did this all without ever having to do an about-face or make a move that felt off-brand. - Noah Callahan-Bever

Noah: The way that Jacob has very carefully grown the breadth and depth of the coverage at the same time has been seamless and very purposeful. And he did this all without ever having to do an about-face or make a move that felt off-brand. That’s the thing, as he’s pulling up on 10 million monthly pageviews and probably a million uniques—these are not insignificant numbers, and the beauty of being part of the Complex family is we have been very successful on the business side and so there’s been an ability to reinvest. The reason I think that this marriage works so well is that as we meet him on the resource side, he meets us on the ambition and idea side. So you see this constant elevation.

I’m extremely proud of what Jacob’s doing. I derive a lot of pride in these owned-and-operated sites, the level at which they’re performing both quantitatively and qualitatively. Every time I post Pigeons and Planes' lists to my Facebook, I get kids from high school and college writing like, "Oh wow, this site’s awesome." Obviously, it’s a microcosm but it means a lot to me and it also just lets me know that what he’s doing is on that cutting edge because it is putting people up on music discovery.

And I absolutely love the name Pigeons and Planes. It’s so obtuse and strange, but when you hear Jacob explain what it means, that to me is a very blog-era 2007 kind of thing, to have this weird quirky not on-the-nose name. But I do think there’s something very poetic and thoughtful about it and I also think that the fact that he had the vision to want to partner with Complex is sort of—I don’t know if irony’s the right word—but it makes sense given the name because in that relationship they are the pigeon and we are the plane.

Even now I feel like we’re kind of flirting with mainstream accessibility just so we can have that chance to speak to those people about what we really love, which has always been independent stuff and the lesser known stuff.

Confusion: I think we’ll always be a pigeon. The planes thing is cool, but the pigeons thing is where our heart is. Even now I feel like we’re kind of flirting with mainstream accessibility just so we can have that chance to speak to those people about what we really love, which has always been independent stuff and the lesser known stuff. So, always a pigeon.