Caryn Rose

Caryn Rose is a music writer, archivist, and historian known for her focus on punk rock, classic rock, and early innovators of the genre, as well as her reportage of live concert performances. She was the co-founder of the award-winning website Five Horizons in 1995, which documented Pearl Jam’s concert history and established a documentation format for live performances which is now widely in use. She has reported on Bruce Springsteen for Backstreets Magazine since 2003, and authored the travelogue Raise Your Hand, about his 2012 European tour. Her first novel, B-Sides and Broken Hearts (2011), tells the story of how a woman’s life was changed the night Joey Ramone dies. In 2022, she published Why Patti Smith Matters as part of the University of Texas Press’ Why Music Matters series. 

Rose regularly writes for publications such as Pitchfork, NPR Music, Vulture, Salon, Pollstar, and Billboard, among others. She had a regular feature in the Village Voice documenting live music history in New York City, and is also known for her lengthy song ranking features for Vulture where she reviewed and rated the entire catalogs of U2 and Bruce Springsteen. In 2018, she authored five essays, ranging from Aretha Franklin to Joan Jett, for the anthology Women Who Rock, and in 2017, she contributed an essay on Maybelle Carter to the essay collection Woman Walk the Line. An inveterate New Yorker, she currently makes her home in Detroit.