An Interview with Writer Lawrence Burney

Talking to the author of 'No Sense in Wishing' about the importance of documenting your local scene.

Jul 08, 2025

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In 2015, I was working at the music website Noisey and a guy named Lawrence Burney came in to interview for an open writer position. I wasn’t familiar with his work, but he sat in a conference room with the staff and told us about how he ran his own magazine, True Laurels, and had spent the last few years extensively covering his hometown music scene in Baltimore, mostly focusing on rap and club culture. After the interview, a coworker pulled me aside and asked what I thought of him. “I think we should hire him,” I said, “because he doesn’t need this job.”

Lawrence just seemed like he was on his own path. Like he was on a mission to keep doing the work he was doing and he was gonna keep doing it whether he got the job or not. He was offered the position the next week.

In my time working next to him in the specific kind of office environment hell known as an open floor plan, I regularly got inspired by two things about Lawrence. First, as a known writer at a reputable publication with a travel budget, he could’ve been profiling any artist he wanted. I’m sure he had huge labels and publicists in his ear, but he largely gave a platform to the up-and-coming artists in Baltimore. And secondly, his journalism didn’t stop at publication. He often took his pieces into the real world with shows and live events with the artists he backed. It was a very DIY approach that I found, for lack of a better term, extremely punk.

And now, he is about to release his first book this week, No Sense in Wishing, which, fun fact, was edited by Kate Napolitano, the editor of my book SELLOUT. The book is an essay collection that documents his time growing up in Baltimore, finding community in music, and the lessons learned along the way. There’s an essay about how his Christian upbringing led to a crisis of conscience for enjoying the music of Three 6 Mafia that made me laugh out loud more than once. There’s another essay about being the only person in his friend group who would cop to enjoying the music of Lupe Fiasco. And other essays about an eye-opening trip to Johannesburg, his mother performing as a warm-up act for Gil Scott-Heron, and his tradition of bonding with his daughter over music. These are very surface level descriptions, of course. The essays contain way more depth and nuance than I can really explain in a few words.

I recently talked to Lawrence about why repping your hometown is so important for documentarians, how to write honestly about the uncomfortable parts of your life, and the recent cover story he wrote for Pitchfork about Turnstile.

NO SENSE IN WISHING

I want to talk about the book but I also wanted to ask you about the recent profile that you wrote about Turnstile for Pitchfork. I liked this as a writer/subject pairing because I know you didn't primarily grow up on hardcore, but you approached the band from a Baltimore angle. Did that help with the band? I know they're doing like a million interviews right now. Did that help set you apart?

Lawrence Burney: Well, it's hard to say what their perception was, but I do think that one thing that Brendan [Yates] mentioned to me was that he enjoyed that they didn't have to spend any time doing this whole advocating-for-Baltimore-type of thing. Like, “let me show you around this hidden gem of a place and let me show you that it's not just what people think it is” kind of thing. We didn't have to do that. I have quite a few mutuals with those guys. Like you said, I didn't grow up in the hardcore scene, but I think the underground and DIY scene in Baltimore is so small that there has been significant overlap over the years. I know that I've been to a party where Turnstile played before, and it was probably with a rapper or something like that. That wasn't uncommon for this scene. All throughout the 2010s, but especially that first half, that was kind of common for a bill in the underground scene, where it would be a rapper, a Baltimore club DJ, a punk or hardcore band, and maybe even a Dan Deacon kind of artist that is trippy, trance, ambient kind of vibe.

But it was a nice challenge, though. I'm really grateful that Pitchfork came to me with the opportunity, because it wouldn't be something that I would probably pitch. When it came to me, I was like, I haven't had this feeling as a music journalist in a while, where you get that challenging assignment where it's like, this is in my wheelhouse, but it's far enough outside of it where I can put on my researcher cap.

What was your research process like for that?

Well, obviously, I listened to all their music. I went through that whole discography. I called up some of my friends from the underground scene, people that were more connected to hardcore and punk, and we just talked about things. It was just nice to treat it like a research project. And then obviously you look up Turnstile, and that takes you to Trapped Under Ice, and that takes you to Angel Du$t.

The underground scene has all these different sects within it, which I think probably every city has, but there are people that I've encountered and been friendly with over the years, where I couldn't quite place them, like into what micro scene they fit into. I wouldn't necessarily see them at the rap shows but I might see them at like the late night diner after, we might have had a class together in college. Funny enough, doing this story put the pieces to the puzzle together for me.

And what's your take on Turnstile as a Baltimore expert?

I enjoy everything I've heard. I sat with the new album for probably two months before it came out, and I know the whole thing by heart at this point. I went to the big show that they did here. I took my daughter with me and her little best friend. They know nothing about hardcore. She just graduated eighth grade. So I'm like, “You're at that age where you need to be placed in unfamiliar environments, just to see new things. Maybe you'll never listen to hardcore ever again but at least you can say you went to this thing.” So they went and they had a good time. Obviously they were thoroughly entertained by the stage dives and the flips. The park that they had this show is called Wyman Park Dell. It goes down. It starts at street level and you walk down into the park. It's a pretty small park, so I had no idea it could fit that many humans inside of it. They estimated like 10K, and every patch of land within eyesight was occupied.

So, I have a lot of respect for them coming out of this DIY super-hyper local scene in 2010 and just staying the course. It really underlines how segregated Baltimore actually is. You have this one side of things, where it's the rap music and the club music, which have their own history. But on the other side of that, you do have a really deep tradition of hardcore, indie, punk, and all those kinds of genres that have a deep history of success, whether that's Animal Collective or Beach House or Dan Deacon, Future Islands, Lower Dens. I was around all of that stuff, I just wasn't necessarily engaging as a fan. Like, I met Sam Herring at a friend's house in 2014 and we were just smoking weed and freestyle rapping. He was freestyling, and I just thought he was just my friend's friend. Then, like a year and a half later, I saw him on Late Night, and I was like, “What the fuck? Is that the guy that I was just chilling with at Greg's house?” It's not that many degrees of separation.

By the way, I caught the little Easter egg in the article, of you sneaking a copy of your book into their photo shoot.

Wait, did I?

Yeah, there's a picture of Turnstile where they're all sitting on a couch. And there's a coffee table in front of them. There's a bunch of books on the coffee table. It's kind of out of focus because it's in the foreground, but on the top, you can see a copy of your galley.

Wait, I completely missed that.

Really?

Oh, man, maybe... I left a copy at Franz's crib when we did the interview, but I completely missed that. I did not notice that. That's crazy. [Laughs]

You were talking about Baltimore, and I always admired that about you while we were working together at Noisey, because you were on a level where you could have covered nationally big artists, but you largely stuck to Baltimore culture. Why has repping Baltimore been so important to you?

I mean, I’m just part of the scene. I came out of that. Which is why my level of respect for Turnstile, the more and more I got to know them, really solidified, because I really relate to that commitment to a scene and an ecosystem that is largely responsible for my success. In no way would I have made it to Noisey had I not been an active participant in the scene that I came out of. I wouldn't have started a zine, I wouldn't have started True Laurels. I wouldn't have put myself out there to meet people and go to music festivals and stuff like that.

I would say it's obviously a conscious decision to pay it forward to the community that I come from, but I think there's also political motivations behind it. I think I really take it upon myself to course-correct the prevailing image that Baltimore has to the outside world, because I know it to not be true. Or, at the very least, I know that it's very incomplete. So I felt like I had an opportunity to really try to paint a more complete picture. I had spent enough time outside of home to realize that people still had such a limited concept of what the city was. I know too many talented people. Why would I not use this platform to shed light on them? I thought it was a goldmine. For me to know that much cool shit that was happening between Baltimore and D.C., and for it to not have any national coverage, I was like, “This is how I separate myself from everybody.” I can obviously still talk about the national and international music scenes, which I did, but I always looked at it like: the way I distinguish myself from everybody else is to mine the community that I come from.

Totally. Something I wanted to ask you about your book: A big mistake I see in people writing about their youth is that it's not honest. Like, they will write about themselves through the lens of being an enlightened adult and pretend that the mistakes of their past didn't exist, but yours doesn't do that. How did you get into the mindset of your teenage self when you were sitting down to write?

I would say the majority of the things that I wrote about in the book are those things that just kind of stuck with me throughout life. So when it came time to write about it, I probably already talked about a lot of those things to people anyway.

I was reading a memoir recently by a musician that I won't name. And the way he writes about being a kid and being like, “Gosh, I didn't understand what the big deal was about being gay.” And it's like, get out of here, dude. It felt so dishonest. But I really appreciated that in your book, you wrote about how, growing up Christian, that was a world that was really foreign to you, and how ingratiating yourself with the queer community in the music scene in Baltimore really opened you up creatively. We got to see your evolution as a person.

Exactly. It would be disingenuous to act like we're not conditioned that way in a society. It's more normal for a young boy growing up in American society to be homophobic. To act like that's not the case, it's just dishonest. It's funny, because I think a lot of my friends who are queer, who are some of my closest friends, I always kind of get bashful and give them pushback when they frame me as this really open-minded person who was welcoming and all of these things. Which, I mean, sure, maybe I am, but I was really open and honest some years back with my friend Abdu [Ali]. I was like, you know, when we first became friends, that wasn't easy for me. I had to think about who's going to think I'm gay because I hang out with a gay person. I even had people in my family be like, “Is there something you're not telling us?” Just interrogating me in a really aggressive way to a point where, early in our friendship, I had the thought that maybe it's not worth being friends with this person because it's just draining. But then I had to step back and be like, if I feel like this, just as a new friend of this person, I can only imagine what this person goes through just being themselves. So, that feels dumb, to submit to that.

What advice would you give to someone who wants to write about their life, specifically in relation to music, in a really honest way?

I would say the thing that you would not want people to know that you listen to or engage with is probably the thing that you should write about the most, because that's the thing that's going to actually make you interesting. Like, everybody listened to Jay Z. I don't want to hear a person talk about how Jay Z changed their lives, no disrespect to Jay Z. If you can find the things that you experimented with in order to reach who you are, I think those are the things [to focus on].

In general, I think as a writer or even just as a consumer, I'm most interested in worlds that are not easily accessible. Like, if you're from Seattle, let me know what was happening in Seattle in the early 2000s, because I have no way of knowing. Those are the things I want to learn about, because through the music, I can learn about the culture, I can learn about the society, I can learn about the evolution of those scenes. You can learn about a city or a town or even a neighborhood, just from underground local music. So I think if there's something that you think people don't care about or is too insulated for people to care, I would say those are the things you should probably lean on the most, because the likelihood of somebody outside of your community knowing about it is relatively low.

That's such a good fucking answer. And I feel like you and I are similar in that we've both written objective music journalism, but then also some things that are more personal and diaristic. And I don't know about you, but the way that I've connected to people over the personal writing has been really surprising. I imagine you must get that even more deeply.

For sure. And because I live in Baltimore, and also just because of my age, when I go out now, the people that I'm encountering, if they're not my age, they kind of look at me as—I don't want to say an elder—but I'm meeting people who are like, “I was reading your interviews in middle school.” And it's crazy, because, for one, I'm not that old. [Laughs] But, two, I think it really encourages me to keep pushing and to encourage younger people to do the same, because more than likely, that interview that those people were reading might've been the only interview with that particular artist, because they just weren't getting interviewed. Obviously I think when you cater to a really niche crowd, people tend to value you a lot more. And I'm sure you can relate, where it's like, I've worn so many different hats trying to advocate for what comes out of where I'm from. I've been a critic, I've been an investigative journalist, I've been an advocate, I've been a fucking show promoter, I've been a zine maker. I've worn all of these hats just to feed the ecosystem. It's hard to juggle sometimes. Just the nature of being a journalist kind of gives you distance where people—they probably like you—but they're still skeptical of you a little bit.

I remember the first time I met you was at Noisey when you interviewed for the job, and the word I walked away thinking about you was “entrepreneurial.” You just had this fire in you. I feel like some people who were doing online music journalism then, that's all they wanted to do. You wanted to do that, but you also wanted to put out zines, you wanted to put on events. What do you see as your role? Do you think about yourself primarily as a writer?

I definitely identify as a writer, but I also maybe—and I think sometimes self-describing feels so cheesy. I feel like as a writer you never want to be that person that's like, “I’m a storyteller.” It feels corny. But I think maybe a documentarian? I feel like that is more encompassing of the things I've done, because I've written, I've even done some video stuff, I've done on-camera interviews. So, I would say a documentarian, a person who takes it upon themselves to log what is happening culturally within a specified time span. There are people that came before me, somebody like Al Shipley or somebody like Brandon Soderberg. If you want to talk about the 2000s in Baltimore/D.C.-area music, I would say Al Shipley is like, the 2000s documentarian, because nobody was covering it as extensively as him.

I feel like if somebody was to look back at my stories decades from now, you would have to say I was that person in the 2010s and through the 2020s who took it upon themselves to document what was happening. Obviously I had blind spots. It was funny, when I shared my Turnstile story, a guy I know from the scene—we're not enemies or anything, but sometimes you just have little rifts with people and we don't follow each other on Instagram or social media anymore. But when I posted my Turnstile story, this guy, I guess he was just getting annoyed by people sharing the story to their Instagram stories, and he commented “mad late.”

Welcome to the hardcore scene, Lawrence. [Laughs]

But I'm like, you know what? I am late, but so what? Maybe Turnstile should have been in True Laurels, but it doesn't matter. I'm here now. I'm engaging with it. I'm not posing as a hardcore insider. I knew them from the start. You'll always have blind spots, but I think why I had so much pride and gratitude for being pulled into that Turnstile story was because I felt like it's one of those stories that feels really important, and I think it shows my reach when it comes to covering what comes out of this region. You can't just put me in rap music or club music or visual art. You have to say: this person covers what comes out of this place culturally and I think that Turnstile story really fortified that.

You said before that you saw your role as a documentarian. But people who are documenting things now are moving away from the written word. It's becoming video, it's becoming these stupid fucking podcasts. There's an essay in your book about how your daughter consumes culture through TikTok. The longer I do this, the more I feel like the written word is becoming a thing of the past. So I really appreciate when I see someone like you who is making writing cool. But do you ever worry about the future of writing? Do you ever think about shifting away from this and into a different medium?

I wouldn't say that for me personally, because I've done it too long at this point. I really am in love with the craft of writing. I think it's probably one of the best things you can do for your mental health, if not for anything else. I think writing this book was the most rewarding and the most challenging thing, because I sacrificed a lot in order to focus on the book. But I think who writing is accessible to might be reverting back to, I don't know, 19th century-kind of vibe where maybe only people of a certain social status read.

It does seem more aristocratic now, in a way.

Yeah. And it might actually help writers out in the long run. It might be good for writers that people who engage with writing now actually really enjoy writing. They're real readers. But I am worried that the people that I really want to speak to might not get it. But I've always felt like that, even from the beginning of my career. Whenever I would go to my old neighborhood or see old friends, I knew that they weren't reading what I was writing. I think that they were just proud that I was doing it. I think they were happy seeing me interview a particular person that they listened to. I think it was more like that. It's not that I didn't feel support. I just knew that I couldn't just write. I had to do something else, like maybe I'll throw a show and then that's how people support me by coming and seeing some artists that they find cool. Maybe I'll make some merch and they'll support me by buying a snapback cap.

But that's why I think what you're doing is so smart. Because I think that the writers who are struggling believe that they can throw their writing up on the internet and that's all that they have to do. But I really admire that you're doing all this cool shit to draw people to the writing. And like you said, maybe people aren't even reading it, but it's still centered around the writing, which is fucking cool.

Exactly. When I go out now, the younger people that I encounter in the scene, I feel more gratitude from them coming up to me and telling me how excited they are to read my book, because I know it's not common for people that age to be expressing an interest in reading a book. These kids, for the most part, are similar to me. They're very enterprising in their actions. A lot of them aren't necessarily college-educated but they're smart, they're creative, they do a lot of cool stuff in the community. So if I can get the books to those kids, I think that's a win. Even if it inspires them to just start a magazine. You don't have to write a book. I didn't think I would. I don’t want to say I didn't have any desire to write a book, but I just didn't see when and how that would happen. I was just writing.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.