From the Editor: Take II, The Other Guy

If you’re a fairly regular visitor to the site, you have undoubtedly noticed our recent dearth of posts and updates. Under normal circumstances here at Live Music Blog, I have typically been able to jump in and pick up the slack any time Justin has been unable to put his full energies into the site.

But exactly at the same moment Justin is grappling with the big changes (and ever-increasing workload) of his new parent company, I am also making some big changes in my life. In order of occurrence over the next 2 months, I will be doing the following:

• moving to a new city (Charlottesville, VA)
• starting a new job (Acct. Manager, MusicToday)
• getting married (to my lovely lady)

I am extremely excited about each of these big life changes, but you can likely see how these could mix together as ‘a perfect storm of important life events’ designed to distract me from blogging. Funny story actually…I recently mentioned all this to a friend who in turn quoted me a study of the “causes of alcoholism,” listing me some of the big life items that tend to push people over the edge. In no specific order, that list happened to include: 1) a change in marital status; 2) a change in occupation; and 3) a change in geographical location. As you can see, I am doing all three in a matter of months. These are definitely the kinds of big life items that are not good for one’s blogging career. But, hey, at least I have an excuse to keep drinkin’ right?

Kidding aside, this is all my way of saying I am in a very similar situation as Justin these days, at least as it relates to the amount of time and energy I will be able to devote to this website. So just at the time we should be picking up steam and jumping headlong into the summer concert and festival season, both of us will be unable to give the site the daily attention it deserves. Rather than focusing on the negatives, we’re using this as a good excuse to take a step back and re-think our intentions with this site.

With tongue-in-cheek, I recently quipped that maybe we should take the hint from Phish, String Cheese Incident, and countless other bands and go on some sort of summer “hiatus.” As much as this was a joke, it is becoming more and more of a possibility.

However, this would not be an indefinite hiatus, as neither of us is ready to throw all of this away. But it does raise a few questions…

• Will we continue Live Music Blog, but with a slightly different approach (maybe less news, more features/columns/reviews)?

• Will we go our separate ways, pushing me to revive Live Music Musings?

• Or will we try something completely new under a different moniker?

Don’t know yet.

Here’s what I DO know. I know that I want to continue all of this in some fashion. I want to continue to create new podcasts. I want keep on writing about the digital music and concert industries. I want to keep dissecting and re-analyzing the ideas that I started to research for my thesis.

And generally, I know that I will need to continue to share my thoughts on great live music, because this guy ain’t done yet….