I must apologize to my subscribers. As we approach a full year since my last post, I find myself amazed by how much has changed over the past year. The global pandemic, (amidst all the destruction we’ve seen worldwide that so vastly outweighs little ole me writing about music), threw off all my routines and patterns of life. My sleep schedule was a wreck for the first two months of quarantine as I wrestled with my vanished work-life separation. My Sunday afternoons spent writing blogs at cafes were gone. I lost both discipline and willpower, which proved difficult to rebuild over the course of 2020.
But one of the more surprising changes that occurred in the wake of this global shift was in my music listening. My ravenous hunger to scour the internet for new releases each Friday had disappeared entirely; in fact, my desire to listen to any unfamiliar music whatsoever disappeared along with it. The amount of music I listened to didn’t necessarily decrease, but I only wanted to listen to music that was familiar to me already, music that was comfortable. My spirit rejected anything new, and with very few exceptions, I had trouble loving or emotionally connecting myself to any of 2020’s new releases, despite the plethora of high-quality music that was released.
So even if I’d had the time or made the time to write about music last year, I would’ve had little to write about. Only now, as we begin 2021 (a year that’s already setting itself on fire), I’m finally regaining some normalcy and reclaiming that verve for discovering brand new music. My plan is to restart my weekly blog posts tomorrow afternoon, Sunday, January 17th. Previously, my two weekly “columns” were the “Friday Awards” and the “Rolling Stone 500.” For the time being, I will be retiring the Rolling Stone series; not only am I far behind the original plan of listening to an album per week, but I also was not expecting the publication to release an updated version of its 500 Greatest Albums list in 2020. I may reinstate this series at some future point, but I have not yet decided whether I would follow the original list or the updated list.
Alongside the “Friday Awards” (where I write a review about my favorite new release of the weekend), I will also be posting a list of the music I listened to the preceding week (coinciding with my 2021 goal of doing a better job keeping track of the media I consume — my thanks go to Last.FM and Letterboxd for that). On a irregular basis, I will be posting other album reviews (mostly for local artists here in the Nashville area — please email music@chasetremaine.com if you’d like me to review your music), and I will also be publishing a handful of articles in upcoming weeks about my new album. Development & Compromise will release everywhere on January 22, 2021 and is currently available for pre-order on Bandcamp.
Chase Tremaine 