Dashboard Confessions: Larisha Paul

In partnership with

Hi everyone. Today, we have the final installment of Dashboard Confessions, my interview series talking to creatives whose interests and journeys are rooted in their teen years on Tumblr. It was so much fun talking to people about what they experimented with there, what they discovered, and what memories they had with the platform!

I talked to Larisha Paul, an NYC-based entertainment and culture journalist whose pen constantly blows me away — especially her tribute to One Direction and Liam Payne last year. I talked to her about fandom and music discovery on Tumblr, which everyone can read below.

No paywall today, but upgrade to the Yapper tier so you don’t future interviews, including next week’s chat with reps from Tumblr. Thank you to Masters of Marketing for partnering with me for today’s newsletter!

Unlock the Social Media Tactics That Work Right Now

Is your social strategy ready for what's next in 2025?

HubSpot Media's latest Social Playbook reveals what's actually working for over 1,000 global marketing leaders across TikTok, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Facebook, and YouTube.

Inside this comprehensive report, you’ll discover:

• Which platforms are delivering the highest ROI in 2025

• Content formats driving the most engagement across industries

• How AI is transforming social content creation and analytics

• Tactical recommendations you can implement immediately

Unlock the playbook—free when you subscribe to the Masters in Marketing newsletter.

Get cutting-edge insights, twice a week, from the marketing leaders shaping the future.

Download The Report

Larisha Paul is one of our foremost experts in music fandom and criticism. Like all critics I trust, she was a fangirl who spent her teen years online with fellow music lovers. 

Paul is a staff writer at Rolling Stone, where she covers the intersection of pop music, the entertainment industry, and broader cultural discourse. While she is admittedly more of a Twitter girl, her insights on the Tumblr music community will resonate with a lot of 2010s teens who used the blogging platform to find new artists. Twitter is where Paul built her community — but Tumblr was a more personal place to explore new interests. 

Since then, Paul has established herself as a leading voice in music journalism and has appeared as a guest speaker on podcasts including the New York Times Popcast and Pop Pantheon. Paul is also featured as a music expert in the CNN documentary Call Me Country: Beyoncé & Nashville's Renaissance, now streaming on MAX.

In an interview with Yap Year, Paul shared her experience with Tumblr versus Twitter, how she used Tumblr for music discovery, and how she sees Tumblr’s legacy in today’s fandom and music space. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Yap Year: When did you join Tumblr and what was your blog like?

Larisha Paul: I made my Tumblr account, maybe a few months after I made my Twitter account [in 2012]. I was on Twitter when you couldn't tweet out gifs, you had to tweet out the link to them. It kind of forced you to have to have a presence on both apps because otherwise you would not have all the up-to-date gifs of Harry [Styles].

I had my blog, and it was very much following a bunch of One Direction accounts, following 5 Seconds of Summer accounts when 2013 came around. I think it really was the place where there was a lot of lore added to things, whereas Twitter added a lot of drama to things that would happen within fandom. 

I always loved how disconnected Tumblr felt from that. It would be like a gif set of Harry or Zayn, or whoever paired with a really devastating song I've never heard of. I discovered a lot of music that way.

I remember how I felt when I was 15 or 16 and reblogging everything on my music tag. I would just go back and remember when I found those songs, what they made me feel, or the rain edits [to the songs]. I just loved how creative it was.

YY: Was Tumblr a more personal space for you than Twitter?

LP: I always think about social media apps as like a layout of a house. Twitter always feels like a living room to me. It just feels like you're hosting a bunch of people in your house. I think Tumblr feels a little bit more bedroomish. You're kind of on your own, and you have your wall of vinyls. You have the things that reflect who you are.

I wasn't really active in the sense of cultivating community on Tumblr the way that I was on Twitter. I made all of my best friends on Twitter. To this day, everybody that I talked to on a near daily basis are people that I met on Twitter when I was 13 years old, and it's the most special thing in the world.

YY: What would you say is Tumblr’s role in online fan culture? What legacy does it have?

LP: It was a place that allowed people to be really unhinged. That's its prevailing legacy. And I think about the amount of lore that I know about fandoms that I had nothing to do with just because of how their Tumblr presence existed, like Supernatural, all of those kind of shows. I've never watched an episode of that before in my life, but I know there was some weird shit going on.

It was almost like the internet version of a Comic Con situation in a lot of ways, which is funny to joke about, but those memories probably mean so much to those people.

YY: Do you feel like your blog had a strong leaning toward one fandom or was it more of an amalgamation of your interests?

LP: It was always very music-centric, just because of who I am as a person. That's what I was looking for. I would use Tumblr to find 8Tracks playlists, to find new music. My preferred way of finding music was always to find it through other people. That's why I hate the aggregated playlist Spotify mixes, or whatever AI situation happens now. I'll even go on Spotify and type in a random lyric from a song to see if anyone has made a playlist using that lyric as the title and see what other songs they have on there. 

Tumblr was the root of that for me, just because it was so easy to find music that other people loved and that other people were really excited about. I think it’s like our modern-day crate digging.

At first, it was a lot of One Direction stuff, and then it was 5SOS stuff. I like that I can go back and look at the different phases and my different levels of fandom. You can get to the 2018 point where I was very, very into Shawn Mendes for quite a few months.

You can see my personality emerge at certain points, like when I discovered interests or hyper fixations.

YY: When you look at your archive, do you see the formation of your future career and interests there?

LP: I wasn't engaging with a lot of journalism, but I think I engaged with writing a lot. I was following poetry accounts, and people writing personal essays and fan fics. The writing wasn't always the best, but the ideas were there.

YY: How has your experience discovering music on Tumblr informed your approach to your work?

LP: I would say that my experience discovering music on Tumblr informed my approach to my work in the sense that I always look for a human connection to whatever music is being sent to me. 

I think I was unprepared coming into this industry for the amount of emails I was going to receive just being like, “Hey, can you listen to this song?” And I think it just lacks the human element of what I love about sharing music with people. 

I think Tumblr was a place where I spent a lot of time listening to 8Tracks playlist made by complete strangers who found a thematic thread through a certain connection of songs, or were assembling playlists that meant something to them, or felt a certain feeling for them. 

I found I've always been pretty bad at predicting who's going to be a big star, because there are artists that I found on Tumblr on those kind of 8Tracks playlists when I was young that I thought were gonna be like the biggest acts in the world, and none of them ended up being the biggest acts in the world. 

Some of them ended up having really bold, cult followings. I remember the night Troye Sivan released his first single and announced his EP TRXYE and everyone had a pink stripe over their profile pictures all over your dashboard. It was just so fun to see him create this kind of cultural moment in his own little bubble of the internet, then over the years see him emerge in a broader pop space and really have a distinct place in that.

Those are the kind of things that I really carry with me from that time, just seeing how cult followings can form, and how music isn't necessarily something that you can quantify in the way that I think a lot of the industry tries to now, where the idea is that a lot of streaming numbers or a lot of data points equals a great song or equals a cultural moment. I think we know that is not necessarily the truth. And I think Tumblr is a testament to that. I think it's a testament to fandom, but also the way that people connect and share with music on a human level versus on a corporate level.

Other things I want to share with you

• I’m loving this era for Lorde. It sounds like she’s really figuring herself out, which is cool. I can’t wait for Virgin. Unfortunately, I didn’t get tickets to the “Ultrasound” tour because — you guessed it — there were 21,000 people ahead of me in the queue ):

• Max, FKA HBO Max, is rebranding back to HBO Max. This diva… I too love to rebrand as my past selves. 

• There were doubters, but FKA Twigs is NOT canceling her Primavera performance 🙏 Eusexua is NOT a state of unemployment!!!

• The “party 4 u” music video is out. Shot by the great Ben Carey who subscribes to this newsletter! 🫶🏻

• Not news, but I’ve been listening to so much Sugababes because of Pinkpantheress’ recent mixtape (which I love). “Push the Button” is so good.