Final Announcement: This Isn't Really Working

If you actually read this blog, I'm sure you've noticed it has been rather slow in the last several months. This isn't just because my main blog has been going through a kind of renaissance, with a post every 1.5 days in May and every 3 days in February, March, April, and June. It's also because I've been doing some thinking about how I enjoy music. The process by which I get into an album is more like falling in love than it is like reading an interesting book, expanding outward in scope. As I listen to it over and over again, certain moments--a particularly stirring vocal line, a lyric that grips my imagination just so, an awesome guitar riff or double-bass-driven rhythm--start to stand out to me and grab my attention. I start enjoying and listening to the songs they're present in on their own as well as in the album. Over time, I may come to be affectionately familiar with the whole album in this way after dozens of listens. If I wasn't into the artist before, I may check out something else in their discography. The whole approach is intensely personal and subjective, and has a definite center on those initial moments or song that I latched onto and how they fit into the work as a whole.

But my writing on this blog has been largely flat, impersonal, and focused on more objective surface-level detail. In other words, how I write about music increasingly doesn't match how I listen to music, which I think is why I've been finding it so hard to write about music even though I've been enjoying it more than ever (especially having finished the β22 amp, also attempting to write about that). In the language of the MBTI cognitive functions, my writing style has tried to be extroverted intuition (creatively looking for patterns and possibilities in external data), extroverted sensing (focusing on immediate sensory experience), or even extroverted thinking (relying on objective facts, lists, and criteria) while I mostly enjoy music with my strongest function, introverted intuition, which is notoriously hard to express with words.

Despite this undeniable fact, for a while I was reluctant to consider the possibility of shutting this blog down. But now I think I've found a solution. I originally split this blog off from my main one (on theology, interpretation, and culture) because I was afraid of overwhelming my main blog with posts on whatever I happened to be listening to at the moment that had little to do with the rest of the subject matter. That danger appears to have passed. So, while I hope not to stop blogging about music altogether, my volume in doing so has fallen to the point where I'd rather just put them on my main blog with the "Music" tag. In the future, look for them there.