Featured Conversation: Talking With Dave Holmes

Published on Mar 8, 2026

IHTOV correspondent Owen Brazas chatted with former MTV VJ and current Esquire editor Dave Holmes about music discovery, and buying and listening to records.

IHTOV: Dave I want to ask you first about discovery. As someone who has worked in radio, television, and media, I would guess you were surrounded by promos and all sorts of CDs and records. It must have been hard not tripping over new artists, and hearing something new. How does 2026’s Dave find something new to listen to?

DH: At MTV, I definitely was inundated with CDs, which I thought was the coolest thing in the world. But it gave me an early strain of the Streamer’s Dilemma: I’d be obsessed with a song or album for a week, and then something new would come in and knock it out of its place in my heart. (The difference is that all of these left a physical artifact behind. My CD book from 2000 is full of forgotten treasures: Neve? Taxiride? COME ON.) 

These days, everything is coming in from all angles at all times. The algorithm just serves me more of what it knows I like, rather than throwing me any curveballs, like a risk-averse radio programmer. I try to lean toward human curation wherever possible: For radio, it’s BBC6 in the morning, KEXP around lunchtime, Kyle Meredith on WFPK in the afternoons. And then there are smaller music blogs, like Christian Finnegan’s New Music For Olds, and music-nerd podcasts like Christian Dueñas’ Primer. A human can surprise me, and the surprise is the key. 

IHTOV: Does finding new music still feel like it is part of your job and treat it as such, or is it just something about you as a person that wants to keep up with music?

DH: I think searching for new music to fall in love with is part of my job, but it’s definitely part of my personality. I like hearing new things, I love that thing where I hear a new song and I have to listen to it over and over all day. It feeds the part of me that’s in charge of being creative. Also I love when I can connect someone, either a close friend or a reader I don’t know in real life, with the song that they have to listen to over and over all day. I don’t think it has to do with the vanity of feeling like I have my finger on the pulse at my age, because I definitely do not, and that’s okay because there is no one pulse to have your finger on anymore. 

Do you have to carve out space in your day-to-day life to find time to listen to things or do you find music just seeps its way in?

DH: Now that I’m medicated for ADHD, I find that I cannot work while music with lyrics is playing. It pulls focus. That was a part of my day when I’d always have music on, and that’s out now. But early in the day as I’m getting my ducks in a row and doing my Wordle, and at cocktail hour as I’m getting ready to cook dinner, I can listen to familiar albums, or the radio stations I mentioned above, or the Classic American Top 40 station on iHeartRadio, if we catch Casey Kasem at the start of a good ‘80s countdown.  

Actually, I can listen to music with lyrics while I work, they just can’t be in English. So Japanese city pop is still in play for work times, and it’s having a big moment in this house right now. 

IHTOV: How do you feel about curation today? With a lot of listeners relying on the algorithm to feed them new sounds, do you find we might be missing a little of that human touch?

DH: Yeah, the algorithm can only sort of keep you in the place where it knows you’re comfortable, and that’s fine, but you won’t remember any of it after. I cannot name a single artist I heard on an algorithmically-created playlist. I need a person to be excited about it before I’m going to get excited about it myself. I’ve gotten some great stuff from the Somewhere Soul IG account, for example. 

IHTOV: Do you collect any sort of physical media or was all of that purged?

DH: My CDs are all in a bunch of CaseLogic books in our storage area. I got rid of the cases probably 20 years ago. Now I just don’t have a CD player anywhere. 

But my partner and I did get back into collecting vinyl, and that’s been a blast to build. We went to Japan last year and got some excellent city pop from a specialty store on the third floor of an office building in Osaka. The owner got a sense of my taste, and kept saying “listen to this one” and putting a new record on. This is not an experience you get in American record stores by and large. Also, we went to Tower Records in Tokyo, and though it was heavy on the expensive 180-gram vinyl we are not interested in, it was full of teenagers in cool outfits, showing out like it was a runway, on the hunt for their people. It is good to know that that still exists. 

IHTOV: Did you have a favorite record store growing up or in school, can you tell me about it?

There were two big ones in St. Louis, where I grew up: Streetside Records and Vintage Vinyl. They were a few blocks apart on Delmar Blvd, right near Washington University. Streetside was the big store where you’d get the new releases: I remember going there on a Tuesday in 1986 when they were unpacking boxes of new arrivals, one of which was Poison’s “Look What The Cat Dragged In,” before MTV was playing “Talk Dirty To Me,” when nobody knew who they were. The manager, who knew me a little because I was in there a lot, pulled out a copy of the LP, pointed at the four glamourpusses on the cover, and said: “Wanna know something wild? That’s MEN.” I couldn’t believe it either. 

DH: Vintage Vinyl was the smaller, funkier store where you could get the imports and the used stuff. It was a cooler staff, and edgier kids would go there. I think I thought I’d go there one day and fall in with a clique of indie teenagers. It didn’t happen, but the store still exists, so maybe it’s not too late.  

IHTOV: What’s the worst and best part about living with a musician?

DH: The good part is that he’s really talented, and I like when he’s banging around in the studio making good music, whether for himself or for a client. That’s good energy to be around. The less good part is that sometimes he’ll engage with something new from a sound-engineer kind of place, like “I don’t like the compression on this one,” about a song that I’m loving, and I’m like “Can we keep that shit out of it, please? I’m trying to be infatuated here.” 

IHTOV: Have you ever lost an album to a break-up (oh this reminds me too much of that other person) and got to reclaim it later? If so, what album, and how long did it take? 

Never! I actually like it when a song reminds me of something big, even if it’s painful. Especially when it’s painful, actually. That’s part of the whole thing! 

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Dave Holmes is a former MTV VJ who is now the Editor at Large, for Esquire

Instagram // Bluesky

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