Holy shit! We've had this blog for 8 years as of today!
We've had many changes since conception. The idea has (without intention) very much turned into something that went from a collective to more of a diary for me to just post random albums, thoughts, or rants in without anyone reading them. I've learned a lot about writing and how I express my love/hatred for music and musicians. I've also learned a lot about organization of the actual site. At this point, there's a pretty massive amount of posts and not even a loser like me would scroll page by page through everything. So I installed the search bar and the labels tab. So you can search for certain key words, or only read things by certain writers.
Our first post explained our purpose and goals. Everyone has different ideas for a "blog" when they hear about one, but our ideas were quite simple. We all loved music and just wanted another platform to talk about it.
"January 01, 2011
HAPPY NEW YEAR
Hello. The four of us are excited to present this to you.
The whole idea behind this site is simply a few friends collaborating together to bring you an assortment of music material. Everything from reviews of shows we go to, local bands we think you should check out, albums we each feel are essential and should be in your collection, bands or "artists" that should be shot for polluting our ears with their garbage music, and anything else we feel like posting. Should be a pretty wide range of bands and opinions. I disabled comments, but we encourage you to check off one of the boxes under each post.
Lots to come here in 2011...
Writers:
Joe Reed
Matt Novak
Matt Woods
Ryan Ferren"
So since that very first post, we've lost one writer, had a few guest writers on a few post, and Woods/Joe haven't written in a while, but I'm hopeful they will again soon. We've posted everything from interviews, favorite albums, overrated bands, mind blowing live shows, and a wide range of genres.
It would be hard for me to pick a favorite post or section because some of them are great for nostalgic reasons and others were just cool posts. I loved how excited Joe would get to post about a black metal band, and then two hours later Woods was posting about a hip hop album, and then 20 minutes after that I'm raving about a soundtrack. Not that we need a "blog" to essentially show off what we're thinking or listening to, but I really like the idea of friends posting about it. It never came off as an attention or ego thing. It was just us killing time at our day jobs, avoiding work to blab about shit we'd be talking about if we were all in the same room.
Some great highlights
(Click each title for a direct link)
- Daily thoughts of Woods: Pretty self explanatory.
- Jonathan reviews music Novak likes: A personal favorite of mine.
- Interviews!: Here's our collection of local interviews we've done over the years. Some of them are goofy, but most of them are really cool.
- Remembering David Bowie: I could still add so much to this post.
- Vlogs?: These were real awkward but real funny looking back on. Just when you thought some posts could be long, set aside a good 40 minutes of babbling for each.
2019 will be a cool year. There's a TON of music from myself and a handful of awesome bands coming out of my studio in the next few months that we'll post about in here and I have interviews with some artists and friends outside of Cleveland coming soon.
-Novak