In my early teens and twenties, I was a consummate blogger. Well, really, I was more of a diarist, spewing thoughts about my life nearly continuously onto a blog of some form or another. In the late 2000’s, I decided to use my ability to spew text to promote music I liked, by converting my journaling domain staires.org into a music blog. The original conceit was that I would post a song every day, for at least a year, complete with a personal anecdote about my personal connection to the song, or at the very least a couple paragraphs of my thoughts and opinions on it.

I believe I made it up to around day 230 before I decided I could not keep up the daily pace and started posting less frequently. But that was a lot of time to do the daily posting consistently, and it got me some early attention. Eventually I got picked up by Hype Machine, which helped promote the blog further. They still have an archived list of 208 staires! songs that they syndicated, which is pretty cool to see. Over time, I built up a small following and made some lifelong music-loving friends along the way.

But life, or mental illness, or monetary troubles got in the way and I eventually stopped updating it. I gave up. I guess I lost the love of the game? I forgot what the point was? I was going through a lot of stuff in the early 2010’s, so who knows what my exact reasoning was. In a bit of a snafu, when I cancelled my hosting for the website, the host ended up turning off auto-renew for the domain. When it came up for renew, they registered it for themselves and wanted to charge me hundreds of dollars to get it back, which I did not have. And that’s why the staires.org domain was advertising car parts and other junk for a long time, probably over a decade.

A couple days ago, I randomly typed the domain into Squarespace, and it said it was available. I was shocked, and I bought it immediately, without thinking much about it, just glad to have it back with me where it belongs. But then I realized today, I’ve never stopped writing about music I like, recommending it to others, I’ve just been doing it privately, directly to friends or small community chatrooms. And in a lot of cases, when I do it that way, I’m just shouting into a void, and most people aren’t even paying attention. What’s the point of doing it that way?

At least if I write a post on a website, it’s something random people can run into. People who enjoy the songs I post can add me to their feed reader, or subscribe via email these days, and I can go back to promoting the music I love to a possibly wider audience.

So, without further ado, you can find me blogging about music again over at https://staires.org. Enjoy!