My Blogging Style

For my New Years Resolution in 2011 I decided to record and photograph and blog about every show I went to that year. It was fun and interesting and thrilling and hard work. I blogged just over 100 times that year and saw more than 380 acts.

Committing to recording and blogging every show made things a bit of a production, almost a job. This inevitably diminished my enthusiasm to go out and listen to music somewhat since I had to have enough energy to also record it and take pictures and blog about it immediately before I forget the details. The rate decreased until I finally threw in the towel and started going to shows as a fan again last year. No requirement to blog or record anything. 2013 was my most media free Bumbershoot in a while.

My blogging ran out of gas and I posted my last blog in August 2013 for Mudhoney's free Mural Amphitheater show.
If you're paying attention you'll notice the Mudhoney video is from Bumbershoot rather than the Mural show.
I continued to go to an occasional show though not too often. As the New Year rolled around I decided to get tickets to the EMP Sound Off! shows. I got my friend Charles Oppelt to go with me and he took some wonderful pictures and the show was fun and energetic and I decided to blog about it. The next week was arguably even better so I blogged about that too. I enjoyed blogging again after the layoff, and I got a pretty large amount of traffic for some reason. I even got linked by the Seattle Weekly, a first for me! It was due to Charles' awesome photo of Noah Fowler really, but I was happy to get the traffic.

Speaking of traffic, my EMP Sound Off! blogs got more traffic faster than any of my blogs ever did before which was gratifying on some level. Don't get me wrong, I'm only talking about hundreds of views so it's not going to make me wealthy - heck, it's not going to make me any money at all, it's just a hobby. I do get some ego inflation out of viewers and it encourages me and predisposes to blog more.

My live show blogs are all pretty similar and largely follow the sequence of acts in the show and comment on each, always saying something positive.

At the end of the year I did some retrospectives and Best-of-2011 lists. I enjoyed doing those both for the fun memories and the ease of using already recorded, processed and uploaded videos.

I've been playing with the idea of blogging about who I thought the next breakthrough Pacific Northwest act would be, so I went ahead and finished writing it and tossed in videos I've recorded live for many of the bands I single out, which was fun: the videos are already recorded and wrangled up to YouTube properly so again it's quick and easy, no cameras to operate.

I'm playing with the occasional "non-(show w/bands in order narrative)" post like this one. Not that I have that much to say at the moment, but I want to try playing around with saying things in different ways.