Fresh Start

Hey folks! I doubt any of you have been paying close attention, but for the two people who might be paying attention, you might’ve noticed that this site went down for a short time. That was partially on me. TL;DR: I needed to scale back on monthly spending and unfortunately that meant the hosting platform I was using to host the Ghost CMS which powered the previous instance of this site had to go. Unfortunately, in the process, and due to unforeseen circumstances, I lost all the site data and was left with just the graphics I designed years ago for the site. Oops.

But, that just means the site reboot I had been planning just got moved up. It also gives me a chance to throw away what wasn’t working, try out some new ideas, and perhaps bring back some old ones. So here’s what to expect from My Life in Music going forward…

The heart and soul, and impetus for this whole thing. These of course will continue, but something I’ve become a bit lax with over the years that most of you won’t have picked up on, is the fact that, in the interest of padding out the playlists so that they’ll end up being generally the same length in playtime, I’ve let tracks onto these playlists that might not have been songs dredged out of my memory at random by my ADHD; songs that might be new releases that I like, or just songs I haven’t listened to in a while. That’s all coming to an end. I’ll be refocusing the playlists on what they were originally intended for, and instead, relegating the other stuff to other playlists instead, which brings me to the next point…

It does what it says on the tin. Every Monday I’ll put out mini-playlists with all the new music that’s come across my Spotify account from artists I’m following the week prior, and I’ll review it too. In the event that nothing new’s been released, I’ll include other music instead: stuff I like but haven’t listened to in a while, or stuff that’s new to me but not necessarily a new release. I’m kinda spitballing with this, so it’s very much subject to change, but for now, this’ll be the format. But it doesn’t stop here…

Every so often I get the idea to come up with some kind of themed playlist, I’ll post these as well. Again this is kind of an experiment, and I don’t know how often these will show up. I want all of this to be as organic as possible. These will likely get their own category/content tag/page on the site.

I go to a LOT of concerts, though this past year has been more than a little chaotic and so I haven’t had the chance to get out to as many as I would have liked. Nevertheless, I try to record footage from these shows and cut it together when I have the opportunity to do so, and then release it on my YouTube channel. I’d like to get back to this, but also start posting that same content here whenever it becomes available.

Look, we all tinkered with it at some point, and don’t be all high-minded and say you haven’t either; we all hop onto bandwagons from time to time. Anyway the point here is, like a lot of us, I’ve woken up to the fact that 99.99999% of the time, AI is more trouble than it’s worth. Moral/ethical debates aside, the posts it was churning out were bloody awful and absolutely the height of cringe. So those posts die with the old blog. It’s going to mean a lot more work on my part, so I can’t promise Pulitzer-worthy content at all times, but I’m damn well gonna try.

It’s no secret I’m bearish on social media. I have made an active effort to remove myself from most of them. Having said that, there are some platforms I’m still willing to support. For now, that’s Bluesky, YouTube, and Discord. I’ve finally bit the bullet and started a dedicated presence for MLIM on each of the aforementioned platforms, the links for which are all listed below.

Yep, we got that too now. For those of you still doin’ the old school thing, you can access the RSS feed here.

I’ll probably try to backfill some old content (mainly playlists, but also concert videos), but otherwise, consider this site tabula rasa. If any of you out there have feedback to give, please feel free to give it via the social media platforms listed above.