Wednesday, December 31, 2014

2014 In Review

Time to recap!

I wrote 43 blog posts this year, including this self-referential one. Those included 11 songs specially-recorded for the blog, 5 songs from a party gig in 1991, and a few reposts. In theory I had upward of 5000 views this year, though I strongly suspect the vast majority of those are bogus. That just makes you, the reader, even more special.

Favorite song post of the year: Lo-Fi Mini-Concert. Even with all the distortion. That's what makes it Lo-Fi.

The majority of posts this year (as is typical) were for NaPoWriMo, which I completed for the fifth consecutive year and led to the annual spike in (plausibly bogus) site visits. Once again, I went with space/astronomy poetry, but with the added degree of difficulty of doing half of it while on another continent at a telescope. I did also post one non-NaPo poem.

Favorite poem of the year is a toughie.  No real grabbers for me, I'll pick two among equals:
Swapping Stories
The Summer Cottage

The Gedankenband and I did release an EP early in the year, called Unselectable. I had a post here about it because, you know, that's the point of a music blog.

Spotify:  I have made an astonishing (to me) $0.10 on Spotify this year. I only have stats for less half of the year, too-- I uploaded music starting in June and only have a report through October. I had a total of 29 plays of 18 different songs. 21 of those plays were from the USA,  second-most are from...Belgium.

My #1 song on Spotify is "One Thing to Do", with a massive 4 plays.

The Gedankenband Bandcamp site stats look like this:
There were 244 "plays",  with 94 of them complete plays.  The most listened-to song this year was "MarcoPolo", with 10 full plays.  Tied in second place with 5 full plays is MarcoPolo's B-side (an acoustic rendition of OBAFGKM), and "Lost in the Artifacts" from the Unselectable EP. 45 different songs got at least one full play this year.

There were 17 downloads (songs/EPs/albums all together). The most-downloaded item was the Holiday Single (of all things).

So, no real point here.  Just looking forward to a good 2015 and wishing the same for all of you!

Tuesday, December 16, 2014

Happy Chanukah 5775





The holiday season is upon us and Chanukah starts tonight, so I figured I'd record something seasonally appropriate for you-- a live one-take recording of the Gedankenband's Holiday single, both A and B sides. Admittedly, since the B-side was already a one-take thing you may not notice too much of a difference.

May your latkes be crisp, your gelt be tasty, and your dreidel always come up on gimel (whether or not you're #TeamAppleSauce or #TeamSourCream.

Judah and the Maccabees (live, acoustic)
Sevivon (live, acoustic)

Still available are the Gedankenband versions!