Tag: music

  • Towards the Within — Vicious Thorn, Rose Chronicles

    It’s been a spell since I added a song to the series of posts that was originally intended to look backwards to look forwards for music discovery.

    I was disappointed with the discovery process, which either sent me to bands I already knew full well or directed me to bands that sounded nothing at all like my “seed” music.

    Rose Chronicles, copyright status unknown

    After yesterday’s post quoting an opinion piece writer who has essentially declared that we have settled for the enshittification of our culture via the monetization of everything artistic thanks to the internet, I was left thinking about the last time I really enjoyed most of the music I was discovering. I can safely say that started to wane at some point near the end of the 90s.

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  • Fallout

    Bass and electric guitar
    Photo by Juan Montana on Unsplash

    As I hit publish on the piece falling yesterday, I was visited with the memory of recording my very first song which, of course, had very little to do with the piece written yesterday.

    Honestly? I’d forgotten the event entirely. But fragments of the song came back and I couldn’t figure out until this morning why the song sounded familiar.

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  • Leaving on a jet plane

    Photo by Lukáš Vaňátko on Unsplash

    I haven’t heard John Denver’s song in multiple decades (until today) and yet… It comes to mind for whatever reasons such things come to mind when I started to think about my impending road trip beginning about midweek. It doesn’t even fit with the theme in which the song was thought to be written for, which is generally how these things work. I’m not going off war, nor standing outside the door of a young beau looking for a last kiss before I leave, and I plan to be back home by the end of next week (so I know when I’ll be back again).

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  • Dumpster diving

    Photo by Shannon Kunkle on Unsplash

    I feel a need to throw a myriad of miscellanea out there to anyone willing to give it a read. This is your classic dumper dive post, where you might find something interesting, maybe even valuable, but what you find might have an equal chance of just being junk. Read at your own risk. No refunds.

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  • Past Penpals

    Photo by Anne Nygård on Unsplash

    I received a lovely surprise thanks to social media yesterday morning: an old email “penpal” reached out to my Facebook account to ask if I was the Michael xxxxx they used to exchange emails with. Of course, I recognized her name right away as Kate (“K8”) from around the 00s, back when the internet was both a much more friendly place, as well as being quite a bit more “wild west” in feel.

    It was the era of making connections, the creeps and trolls hadn’t found a foothold in cyberspace yet, and MySpace was still the hotbed of the music scene. If I come off more as a “blogger” in the flavor of that time period, it’s because that’s where I cut my teeth on blogging, before everyone had to monetize every little thing they did, and influencers were still a daydream. We were largely an online journaling community still, the precursor to the oversharing of social media, which is why some of us learned our lessons very early on and are somewhat circumspect about what details we share online (all the while going to great lengths to sound like we aren’t being circumspect).

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