John Vogel

My March 4th was on the whole pretty unremarkable, but after I detail it, I want to use this post as an opportunity to talk quickly about why I love Philadelphia.

7:30 - Wake up, cook breakfast for my wife and child, get my kid ready for school while my wife gets ready for work. She takes him to school and heads to work, then I sit down to put the finishing touches on a piece and podcast that I was supposed to release on 2/28.

9:53 - Hit publish on the Substack post for the piece. The podcast episode is a roundtable discussion with parents who balance childcare with a creative pursuit and going through the logistics of how they make it work and where they struggle.

9:54 - Play through a half hour piece of piano music that I've been working on since the end of last year.

10:45 - Exercise and then eat lunch.

12:15 - Go to King of Prussia for a follow-up appointment. Last week I had a minor procedure done on some varicose veins in my leg.

2:00 - Make a few tweaks on the piece based on some feedback from the participants in the podcast, then start a piece for my own Substack detailing why I haven't posted due to my hectic February.

4:50 - Pick up my kiddo from school and let him play on the playground. (We just started having him do an after school program on Mondays, so that's my longest day to get stuff done.)

5:55 - Head home to cook dinner.

6:45 - Eat, play, and start transitioning to bedtime.

7:30 - Read books for bedtime, and then my wife does the last part of bedtime while I...

8:30 - Do dishes and clean up.

9:00 - Long walk.

10:00 - I decide not to do any work and instead watch TV then go to bed (currently ensnared in Shameless).

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I live out in the neighborhood of Mt. Airy right now, but I lived in West Philly for about 11 years before I moved out here 9 years ago. It's a pretty classic transition when West Philly kids want to start a family and buy a house.

I moved to Philly in 2003 right after college because my friends and I had a band. We started throwing shows in our house, which eventually became a very popular spot for underground shows (Danger Danger House and then Gallery). Coming out of that time period, our band Grandchildren continued touring and putting out albums until 2019.

Throughout the first half of my time in Philly I also worked for a couple magazines (Rockpile and Skyscraper), and then for the last 10 years I've been increasingly involved in the online magazine (and now podcast) Talking Writing, where I'm now creative director.

Most of my adult life I've cobbled together a living from many different small jobs, making as much time for art as I could sustain. I've always felt like Philly is a good place for the arts because it's a comparatively cheap city. And for underground music, it's a huge help that the police don't seem to care much about noise because they have bigger fish to fry.

At the end of collecting interviews for my multimedia project Weird Music, I started collecting interviews for a project I stopped working on called Heart Over Capital. In it I wanted to hold up Philly as an example of a city that fosters creativity better than other east coast counterparts like NYC and DC because the pressure to earn money isn't as high. You can still get by pretty well with a relatively low income.

Of course things have been changing and getting more expensive throughout the time that I've been living here (and most dramatically during the pandemic), but that's been happening everywhere, and I still feel like our city is way more affordable than other cities of comparable size.

At this point I've firmly put down roots here. My wife and I bought a cheap fixer upper in 2015 and have no plans to go anywhere any time soon. We're gonna ride this low mortgage as long as we can.

I didn't take any pictures yesterday—and spent much of my day looking at my computer—but these are some of my favorite shots of Philly sunsets that I filmed for art projects.

John Vogel is a musician and multimedia artist who has been making solo music alongside playing in bands, such as Grandchildren and Rad Racket. He's the creator of Weird Music, a project mixing video interviews with music, and the Creative Director of Talking Writing. He's been hanging out with his son for most of the last six years. You can find him on Instagram @jawnvogel.