Origin Stories Lizzy Goodman on Meet Me In the Bathroom
Lizzy Goodman is a longtime music journalist whose work has helped shape how the early-2000s indie rock era is understood and remembered. Over the past two decades, she’s written for Rolling Stone, Spin, New York Magazine, Nylon, and The New York Times Magazine, profiling artists from MIA to Conor Oberst to the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. She writes incisively about individual musicians and albums while situating them inside a larger cultural moment — part journalist, part historian. In this episode, she talks to Matthew about Meet Me in the Bathroom, her oral history of New York’s indie scene in the early 2000s, and the 2022 documentary inspired by the book. Goodman explains how she organized hundreds of interviews around events rather than timelines, treated New York City as the central character, and documented a scene where no one agrees on what actually happened. “It’s like filling out a crossword puzzle that’s moving,” she says. “I kind of built these individual narrative blocks and then you have to weave it all together.”In this episode, she talks to Matthew about Meet Me in the Bathroom, her oral history of New York’s indie scene in the early 2000s, and the 2022 documentary inspired by the book. Goodman explains how the project took shape voice by voice, why oral history was the only form that made sense for a scene with no single truth, and what it means to document a moment where memory, myth, and experience are constantly in conflict. “It’s like filling out a crossword puzzle that’s moving,” she says. “You’re building this narrative, and then you have to weave it all together.”
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