Dedicated to my fellow bloggers…

• When I first started blogging way back in September of 2015, my first commenter was supportive and said I would find it rewarding. He was right. By and large I do. We have to compromise so much in life it’s nice to have one place where that’s not the case.
• That said, it can also be quite frustrating and I have sometimes been very tempted to give this blog up. Sometimes I go for a week with no comments and I think, Why am I doing this when I appear to be talking to myself? But then someone will come in with a great comment and a few have said they dug the blog. So I’m hanging in there for now.
• Some people have wondered where I find the time to blog. Simple. It’s amazing what you can get done when you give up TV a couple nights a week. So instead of binge-watching “House of Cards” for four hours, I write. (That said, is there really such a thing as too much Law and Order? 😂)
• I try to keep things interesting by having some variety. So, write-ups on bands, serial posts, song of the week, random discussions about the music industry, one song/three versions, etc.
• It’s always fun to watch the “Most Viewed Posts” section to see what’s “going up the charts” and conversely, what’s not. Occasionally people find old posts and read them, which I like. Sometimes we talk for a day or two about a particular thing. And sometimes posts just go down in flames and I don’t know why. I kinda get that nobody knows Leo Kottke. But Hall of Famer Elvis Costello, despite his recent re-occurence on the list, is one of the least read series. A puzzle.
• BTW, I rarely, if ever, modify a post. But I realized I should have listed U2 as an honorable mention in my favorite bands post. Since rectified.
• I have no idea why people follow or don’t follow a blog. Nor do I have any idea of whether a post will be popular or not. No clue. I just toss stuff out there, hope for the best.
• And I have no idea how to explain the continuing popularity of my Savoy Brown review. Do that many people even remember them? And the song “Can’t Find My Way Home?” As I write this, it’s number 2 on my “Most Viewed” list. I wrote that post seven months ago! Was it re-released or something? I don’t get it.
• For all that, I’m never deterred from writing about something I love, regardless of how I expect it to be received. This is a heavily rock-oriented blog. But I’ll still post on jazz. Even if one person gets something out of one post then it’s all worth it.
• As a rule, I tend to say my favorite song (or list) rather than the greatest. I saw some other guy’s blog who said something like, “Rush is the greatest band of all time, end of story.” Who the hell is he to decide that? Or me for that matter. So I go with my favorite list, reasoning that your mileage may vary.
• I am also on somewhat of a “mission.” That mission is to try to prevent great music that is not current from falling by the wayside. I talked to another blogger on his site. He teaches music and his students have never heard of The Band. They could hardly have been more influential. I blogged a while back about Sly and the Family Stone. No comment. Again, so influential in funk and in jazz. These bands shouldn’t be forgotten.
• Likewise it bugs me when I hear someone say, “Oh, that (song, album, movie) is so old.” Seriously? So what? Is Dark Side of the Moon now lousy or irrelevant because it didn’t come out last week? Tubular Bells, hailed as a masterpiece? How about “Blue Moon” or “In the Still of the Night?” Should we no longer listen to Beethoven because he died almost 200 years ago? And we’re so over him? All music is, to me, current.
• I have about fiften channels on Pandora. And there’s nothing more I like than to shuffle them and go from blues to oldies to jazz to Motown to Sinatra to zydeco to classical guitar to funk to folk in the space of 45 minutes. What a gift we have to be able to do that. Just fantastic. And it all flows together.
• So this is perhaps a quixotic quest to remind people that great music is great music is great music. It’s “oldness” is completely and totally 100% irrelevant. So I will, sooner rather than later, be posting about doo-wop, girl groups and ’50’s rock ‘n roll. If that turns you off, maybe this isn’t the blog for you.
• Or, you could just see me as an old fogey, reliving his youth. 😀
• Since I now have about 8 million posts out there, I’m going to blog less, maybe twice/week, do a series maybe every six weeks. I could literally blog every day. But on the blogosphere, I’ve learned that less is more. I’m trying to find that sweet spot between overloading the reader and keeping my own interest up. Truthfully, if I had to blog only once a week, it would drive me crazy and totally not be worth doing.
• I promised (at least myself) that I wouldn’t do more than three posts in a series. Of course I violated that with my Woodstock series. But that will be the last five-post series. Two or three posts in a series spaced out over four days each feels about right.
• Comments are something every blogger wants but are so challenging to get. This is because, as I’ve discovered, most people just like to “read and run.” It takes a bit of effort to comment. I know this because I am a blog reader myself and something has to trigger me to make the effort to comment. But that said, I greatly welcome comments. And if you’re a foreign reader uncomfortable with English, hey, “Nice post” or “Not sure I agree” is fine with me.
• All that said, I want to single out those followers who comment most frequently, providing me with what I really wanted from this blog in the first place – conversation. So, thanks to all readers for reading and special tip of the hat to: Runaway American Dream, restew, Dark Star Review, Mumbling about Music, Tangled up in Music and Crotchety Man.
• Lastly, the Internet is a strange and wondrous thing. Even though the great preponderance of this blog’s readers are in the US, the Music Enthusiast now reaches all six habitable continents and 77 countries (or about 39% of the countries in the world). These numbers are not, I think, atypical of anyone who writes on the Internet. Nevertheless, I find it pretty cool this blog has been read from Sweden to India, from Russia to Fiji, from Vietnam to Kenya, from the Netherlands to Curacao to Finland to the UAE to Curacao to Turkey.
• Oh and in case you’re worried about privacy, this is all I see