My original intent in 2023 was to press on with the goal of doing four posts a week. I’m in a bit better position than I was last summer and I’ll have enough time to dedicate to making sure I post as much as I personally want.

I’ve had an idea for something for awhile now, but I haven’t gotten around to running with it yet. And also, this today isn’t about that one. That future one will probably see the light of day in the next month or two and take over Fridays.

But I was also sort of inspired with an idea that I’ve used before on a different site. It kind of came to me as the year was ending/beginning and I saw people doing lists of the books they read and wanted to read the next year.

The premise is simple – why not take that same approach to albums? I have a shelf full of CD’s, another full of records and a pile of digital stuff that I’ve barely put a dent in. Plus streaming access gives me almost everything I could ever want to hear, so why not dedicate some time to making sure I listen to some of it?

What I’m going to do specifically is listen to an album a day, at least statistically. By the end of the year I should have covered 365 albums. It’s not hard to play at least one album a day, hell there are days I listen to several. This should be a piece of cake as a “resolution” in the loosest possible terms.

I’m not going to post every day about an album. My typical kinds of posts will remain. What I’ll do with this new “album a day” series is update it once a week on Saturdays, recapping seven albums I played the week prior. It won’t be full-on reviews obviously, rather I’ll give a quick paragraph to each.

I won’t be using this to discuss things like, say, Somewhere In Time that I’ve listened to a trillion times. Playing something like that is almost cheating in this instance. Rather I’ll give a focus to albums I haven’t heard in a long time or ever. I’ll also use it as a means to judge if something in my collection even needs to be there. I have a bunch of CDs that I got from record label “grab bag” sales that I’ve barely gone through, this would be a good way to give those some attention and see if I should keep or lose them. That won’t apply to every album I cover but will be a small part of what I do with this new gig.

I’ll also give time to new releases that catch my eye/ear. I don’t do reviews of new music normally, as I feel like it takes a lot of time to sit with an album before getting to detailed about it. I’d rather cover a variety of other topics so I don’t dedicate the time to do those kind of reviews. This will allow me to cover a few things that come around that won’t be candidates for my end of year list but I still want to cover.

And it’s also worth noting that the albums here don’t have to be noteworthy or even good. I’d never use my Album Of The Week feature on something I think sucks, unless the band is super important to me and I feel like I can get detailed about it. I might very well not like something I play on here and will be more than happy to discuss it.

It’s a bit funny that I “stumbled” into this idea because I actually tried it out as a blog back maybe nine years ago. The entire blog’s premise was that I would do this exact thing. I posted once, possibly twice before losing focus and not doing it any further. I just wasn’t ready to blog again, or at least not ready to put any real effort into it. Now that I am at least somewhat committed to running with one for awhile, this becomes an easy way to get a bit more content out there. It’s far more of a time investment listening to albums than it is to write a small bit about them and I listen to stuff a fair bit anyway, so it’s a win-win.

So the “Album A Day” series will kick of NEXT Saturday, January 14. I need a week to play an album a day so the final 2023 “AAD” column would hit in the first week of 2024. It’s a bit odd of a time frame but I think it’ll work out. It’s not like anything is riding on me doing it in a certain scope of time.

As for the other new series, I do expect to get that off the ground sometime in February. It’s a pretty easy thing to write that won’t take up much of my time, I just need to mess with it a bit to get the ball rolling. Once that gets going I’ll have posts six days a week, which is honestly more than what I was aiming for but I think it’ll pan out. The biggest adjustment will be me getting the other posts ready in time, something I got a bit of a leg up on at the end of 2022 so it should be smooth sailing.

Thank you all who read my stuff, I hope my plans for this year give you something to enjoy, crack up about or whatever it may be. As for the rest of this week, the Iron Maiden singles series kicks off tomorrow and, well, the Friday post also just happens to be about Maiden. See you then.

The following song is from something that will be on the first post of the new series.