Hello, folks! I don’t usually write about stuff on here that isn’t directly related to music. What I did want to do, though, is share my current progress in 2020 are the major changes coming to this blog over the next month and a half!
While my site dates back to 2018, I’ve only been blogging on here steadily since November of last year. In that time, I’ve gone from a nothing site with a fistful of posts to a place with 500+ landing points (and growing daily!) of events in music history, reviews of studio and live work, and other miscellaneous writings. I’ve gotten more than 1600 people here every month since last December with my average daily traffic now around 84 viewers, increasing numbers coming from searches.
Content-wise, in that time, I’ve done a few things. I have written up at least one post per day on every single date between today and January 1st, with most dates between November and the end of the year. Within that larger bracket, I have covered three tours in their entirety already:
- Emerson, Lake & Palmer’s Get Me a Ladder Tour
- Rainbow’s Memories in Rock 2018 Tour
- 3’s sole US Tour
I have also covered every stage in the rollout of Deep Purple’s forthcoming album, Whoosh! Thus far, the coverage has been in five parts:
- The first teaser
- The cover reveal
- A review of “Throw My Bones”
- A review of “Man Alive”
- A review of “Nothing at All”
Ongoing projects include laying the groundwork for my historical study into Deep Purple’s first tour with Don Airey, covering Rainbow’s Difficult to Cure Tour, and covering ELP’s Works Tour. By the end of the year, I hope to have these and more covered in full. As you can see, I’ve been pretty busy!
That being said, my current state of business pales in comparison to what is to come this month. August 2020 is probably going to be the single busiest month this blog will ever see, with the greatest explosion of new content planned. This will include, but will not be limited to:
- Continuing coverage of ELP’s Works Tour, including their famous performance at the Montreal Olympic Stadium which would become Works Live
- Continuing coverage of Rainbow’s Difficult to Cure Tour, namely the fourth leg of the tour (the Japanese-Hawaii leg)
- Beginning coverage of ELP’s Debut Tour, which began fifty years ago this month at Plymouth Guildhall
- Beginning coverage of ELPowell’s sole tour, which began in August 1986
- Full coverage of ELP, Deep Purple, and Dream Theater’s 1998 North America Tour
- Concluding thoughts on Whoosh!
- Work on ‘The Surprising’, including beginning coverage of Deep Purple’s 2001 European Tour, insight into Don Airey’s unexpected entry into the band, and a comparison of differing solo styles of major rock keyboardists.
I look at this list and feel a bit of apprehension, because this is a lot of stuff that matters a great deal to me. I most definitely do not want to screw it up. I hope you’ll be joining me for at least some of these projects!
It is at this point that I have decided to switch from my free wordpress.com blog to a self-hosted wordpress.org website. As I’ve said at the end of every post for which I’ve been brave enough to include my ko-fi and patreon asks, I was always planning on upgrading my site for greater user accessibility and greater control on my end. I have chosen to use wordpress.org rather than a premium wordpress.com plan because this is cheaper and gives me even more freedom in running things. This is the first website I’ve ever tried to run, so I’ll be the first to admit that I have no idea what I am doing. However, I am going to take this leap of faith, and hope you’ll do so with me!
In the far future, there’ll be no major change between gottahearemall.wordpress.com the blog and gottahearemall.com the website. In the first few days, you might see a few missing images, dead links, etc. However, I aim to get that all cleaned up quickly so that I can get on with running things.
Before September 15, you can expect to see the following changes:
- My On This Day page will be brought up to date
- Addition of a privacy policy
- Additions to any posts which I have the time to update. With any luck, I will have brought my post length average significantly up by then!
- Upgrades to inner linking
- Changes to ads
Thank you for your patience as I get going on this next exciting project!