Meet Me in the Bathroom: Rebirth and Rock and Roll in New York City, 2001-2011

A riveting oral history that chronicles the rebirth of New York rock——from the bars of the Lower East Side to the warehouses of Williamsburg—and a time that changed music, and the city, forever

In the early 2000s New York City served as the unlikely stage for a radical renaissance where bands like the Strokes, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Interpol, the Moldy Peaches, LCD Soundsystem, and others who had been honing their craft in obscurity, suddenly became reflections of a newly flush, newly booming town determined to recover from the devastation of September 11.

Meet Me in the Bathroom explores how during this era the music industry was dismantled and then reborn via technology—first by Napster and later iTunes—and by evangelist bloggers and edgier journalistic upstarts like Vice and Pitchfork. As the reshaping of the city—technological, aesthetic, cultural, and physical—spread from downtown Manhattan to Williamsburg, Brooklyn, bands like MGMT, Vampire Weekend, TV on the Radio, Grizzly Bear, and Dirty Projectors became the new stars, remaking the idea of New York in their own nerdy image, and establishing “I heart Brooklyn” as the mantra of a new generation.

Crafted from nearly two hundred original interviews and curated by a writer who remembers the hangovers herself, Meet Me in the Bathroom charts the first decade of the 2000s in all its epic and reckless glory, and is a brilliant portrait of a city, an industry, and a generation on the verge of seismic change.

Lizzy Goodman is a journalist whose writing on rock and roll, fashion, and popular culture has appeared in the New York Times, Rolling Stone, and NME. She is a contributing editor at ELLE and a regular contributor to New York magazine. She lives in upstate New York with her two basset hounds, Joni Mitchell and Jerry Orbach.