The Diner Test: Writing to People, Not at Them (Kevin Alexander On JUST PRESS RECORD)
November 12, 2025·0 comments·zg
That's when you know you've found somebody really special. When you can just shut the f*** up for a minute and comfortably share silence.
Mia Wallace, Pulp Fiction
Kevin Alexander lives in anything but silence. He’s listening to and reviewing music all of the time. He’s working around airplanes (which, are loud!).
But despite all the sounds - he writes newsletters that presumably are read as alone as they are written, without audio, by people he’s mostly never met.
The act of the share is silent. Everything else is as noisy as it wants to be. It’s a weird detail.
That silence allows for a radical practice to emerge. Over the years of writing On Repeat Records, Kevin’s continuously returned to the habit of writing to specific people, not aimed at a wide audience.
It frequently involves names on post-it notes. It’s a method to (silently) imagine a real life conversation and what he would want to tell a person he can imagine sitting across the table from him, over coffee, at a diner.
He knows if he’s writing to everyone he’s writing to no one. He knows if he’s writing to Janet, because she already loves The Cars so she will totally understand where he’s going with an explanation, he’s got a (pun intended) lane to steer the conversation down.
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