Biography
A Minnesota-based freelance writer who studied at Bemidji State University, Tom Hallett grew up absorbing country classics by Hank Williams, Patsy Cline, Kitty Wells, and George Jones amid lively family gatherings. Constant radio exposure from his mother led her, around his eighth year, to pick up an acoustic guitar and tackle rock numbers such as Janis Joplin’s rendition of “Me and Bobby McGee.” At age nine he experienced his first transcendent musical moment when the Carpenters’ “Rainy Days and Mondays” filled the airwaves just after he witnessed his dog struck by a speeding car. Throughout the 1970s, AM Top 40 formats shaped his listening habits, blending acts as divergent as Kiss, Debby Boone, and Rose Royce within single hours and fostering an enduring openness to varied styles. The following decade found him immersed in the hedonistic scene surrounding hairspray-laden metal bands, even while later developing an appreciation for the Minutemen, Black Flag, and the Del Fuegos.
Disillusioned by the late 1980s with formulaic broadcasts saturating cars, bars, and the airwaves, Hallett encountered Minneapolis’s low-wattage KJJO in the early 1990s. Programmed by the future Revolution Radio founder Kevin Cole, the station juxtaposed Ned’s Atomic Dustbin, Television, the Ramones, and the Clash alongside Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, the Everly Brothers, and Patsy Cline, revealing to him that disparate genres could coexist. This revelation prompted him to launch a writing career so that knowledge of such artists would not remain private. An internship at the local punk zine The Squealer yielded conversations with figures ranging from Badfinger’s Joey Molland to the idiosyncratic singer-songwriter Vic Chesnutt.
After a brief period as music editor at the weekly arts paper The Pulse of the Twin Cities, he expanded into periodic online freelance assignments. To date he has conducted more than one hundred interviews, among them Sonic Youth, John Fogerty, the Replacements’ Tommy Stinson, Joe Henry, Pantera, John Cale of the Velvet Underground, Son Volt, the Spinanes, Babe the Blue Ox, and numerous rising local acts. He anticipates both disseminating and broadening his musical insights at AMG while eagerly awaiting the year’s forthcoming releases.
Disillusioned by the late 1980s with formulaic broadcasts saturating cars, bars, and the airwaves, Hallett encountered Minneapolis’s low-wattage KJJO in the early 1990s. Programmed by the future Revolution Radio founder Kevin Cole, the station juxtaposed Ned’s Atomic Dustbin, Television, the Ramones, and the Clash alongside Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, the Everly Brothers, and Patsy Cline, revealing to him that disparate genres could coexist. This revelation prompted him to launch a writing career so that knowledge of such artists would not remain private. An internship at the local punk zine The Squealer yielded conversations with figures ranging from Badfinger’s Joey Molland to the idiosyncratic singer-songwriter Vic Chesnutt.
After a brief period as music editor at the weekly arts paper The Pulse of the Twin Cities, he expanded into periodic online freelance assignments. To date he has conducted more than one hundred interviews, among them Sonic Youth, John Fogerty, the Replacements’ Tommy Stinson, Joe Henry, Pantera, John Cale of the Velvet Underground, Son Volt, the Spinanes, Babe the Blue Ox, and numerous rising local acts. He anticipates both disseminating and broadening his musical insights at AMG while eagerly awaiting the year’s forthcoming releases.