2019 - My year for music

Different music goals and intentions with varying levels of difficulty have been on my mind. I've decided this year is the year I go for broke and do them all.

One longstanding desire was to make my Band Reviews spreadsheet public, via Dropbox or something. Before doing that, I wanted to expand the Reviewed tab. What I had was the name and whether or not I had seen them live. I initially only did it to keep track of numbers, and to be able to scan for names when I was having trouble remembering something. I was always aware that there could be more useful information, like where they were from, their label or if they were unsigned, and maybe a brief description, plus URLs.

I never got around to doing that, and then my hard drive crashed and I lost everything. I was able to reconstruct a lot of the bands to be reviewed and that were recommended, probably with some misses that I don't know, but I have never tried reconstructing "Reviewed".

Obviously, it would be more work. At the time I think I had about 19 bands to be reviewed from Twitter follows, and there were probably just under forty recommended bands, but I had recently passed 500 bands reviewed.

At the same time, it would be easier because I could find them all by going through the blog posts. For those waiting for review, I had to go through my Twitter follows that had not been reviewed yet, and hope no one had un-followed me since (though it would kind of have served them right). Recommended bands was all from memory. I actually have a reliable chronological record of my reviewed bands until such time as Blogger irrevocably collapses.

But if I am going to do it, I should do it better: commit to which fields I want to fill in, and then do it. Also, the number has only gone up. I counted up from 500, and I can tell you that tomorrow's review will be for band number 599.

That will take a while, but it will also be full of good memories. Just thinking about the start, when I was suddenly getting the chance to see bands I had wanted to see for so long, and falling for new bands... there are a lot of great memories from that time period, and it led to some really good things too. I have actually been wanting to do that since May.

https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2018/05/beloved-songs.html

Recently I have been getting fewer new band followers, and my blogging has become somewhat more irregular (though still pretty impressive considering), and I have been thinking maybe I should wind things down. If that happens, and I only go to 700 instead of 1000, then I am going to go out with a feeling of completion. I will get everyone currently in the spreadsheet before I stop, for sure.

Since I am going for completion, here are some other things that need to be wrapped up. I still have a list of 24 bands from the Nothing Feels Good  listening that I mean to look into more. They are not all emo bands, but some of them are. I will be working on that soon.

I also have a list of 32 bands that some of my early young Twitter mutuals obsessed over. I want to at least listen to a sampling of them. I am working on that now.

Listening to Christmas music, I have been thinking lately of what songs have been popular in different time periods, and how the music has developed.

Yes, I am quite positive some of that is remembering how much more I liked listening to the radio on Christmas in the late 70s that the equivalent now; why do they use such a small subset of the available music out there, and so often the most inferior subset? (Yeah, I know the Telecom Act plays a part.)

I will be working on that later, probably starting in the fall.

Finally, this is really the year I am going to release a week of songs by me. I thought 2018 could be the year after doing some recordings for my Music for Wellness class, but I would not have been happy with the quality level I could have achieved then. If I start planning ahead, this year I can do it.

I am not yet committed to whether there will be videos.

Also, so far it looks like I can go to about one show a month this year, at least for the first quarter. I would like to keep that going.

Most of these shows are not so much for new bands, but are musicians I have already seen and connected with. That feels pretty good too.

It also feels good to be excited about things, and for this stuff, I am.