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).
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.
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).
Listening to some of the post-punk/darkwave/synthwave music I’ve been listening to these past few weeks has inspired me not only to pick up the bass once again, but to get back to playing around with some songwriting and DAW recording as well. [DAW = digital audio workshop, a home studio option for the modern era].
As I was discussing this direction in comments with Chris, I began to think that it might be interesting to at least some of you to share with folks the general thought process and progression of how some of us — or at least I do — get about to writing music.
Any of you who read comments (or more than surface level at what I write) will have likely figured out that I went and bought myself a low- to mid-range electric bass last night. It may seem rather sudden, but it has been part of my thinking for quite a while. Years, in truth. And several months in earnest. I don’t just drop money on anything over $25 without some serious thought.
So it wasn’t on a whim, as much as it might have seemed to have been.
