2016: Time to Change!

Hello!

First of all, thank you to anybody who has followed this blog since it's initial posts in 2014, where I stumbled on to WordPress looking to practice writing about music by informing people friends/collaborators from around West Michigan. Over 2015, it expanded to include more posts regarding specific events, promote new projects, and to take up new challenges, closing the last half of the year with a challenge to listen to a new album every day for a year. Needless to say, ambitions are still high, but it's time for a shift.

The project is a fun idea in retrospect, but it's like starting a new diet (which I'm doing in fact), where you get motivated by the idea, hit the ground running towards the end results, and reaching that point where it is not a habit but a chore. I made it about 13 weeks in and I can definitely say that the holidays were a time to take a break. I was no longer seeing the joy of discovery in new albums while at the same time showing disdain for my lack of enthusiasm behind my writing: reviews got shorter, I accumulated a backlog and tried to cram multiple albums into the same day, and I got burnt out during the busy times around Christmas. It was definitely a time of learning for me, showing that it does take time, patience, and a clear direction to condense music impressions into smaller reviews.

So what is this post about? You probably skipped to this paragraph, so let me just say that 2016 is going to be the year I keep up with this blog. It's time to focus on more than just listening to albums (although the project will continue) and get back to the roots of this writing space. It wasn't to flex my listening muscles so much as it was a chance to hear and experience the stories around music in West Michigan, diligently working to highlight people and have their voices heard. I want to get back to interviewing friends, reviewing shows and project recordings, and inform about the music scene in West Michigan from the perspectives of musicians I work with and myself. Here's to 2016, a year of progress! Let's improve together and see what we can learn.