Blowtorch Baby: Carved SUK FOR HONESTY on my chest

I realized that, except for in my profile, I haven't laid out a modus operandi or anything like that yet. This is because I tend to find it really irritating whenever someone lays out a modus operandi. So... here's mine:

i.) I only post one song at a time because there are thousands of other sites / blogs / torrents which apparently take great pride in giving you huge amounts of mediocre stuff, but how many are there that prescribe a small dosage of truly great stuff? Isn't your hard drive full enough already, without force-feeding it another live concert by your 174th-favorite band, or b-sides by that teenage Bulgarian punk band from 1982 that someone told you about? It's astounding to me, from legal, ethical, and logical standpoints, that so many sites simply give away entire albums, even major-label ones, as though it were no big deal. It is a big deal, and I don't take this responsibility lightly. I believe strongly in the concept of intellectual property rights, and I always feel somewhat queasy about giving away someone else's intellectual property. The name of this blog is of course stolen from a lyric to a song (by A.C. Temple), so I still feel a little guilty whenever I look at it. And the photo image at the top of the page is a photo I swiped and heavily cropped & color-altered almost beyond recognition, creating essentially a whole new work. (Yes, it was green palms against a blue sky.)

ii.) It sounds selfish, but I've discovered that my favorite thing about doing this site is that it gives me my own little permanent online jukebox of my favorite songs. After I post a song, I usually listen to it at least a dozen times on here over the ensuing few weeks, trying to get into the minds of those people who are just hearing it for the first time. The main criterion for a song to make it onto this blog is that it has to be something that I want to listen to over and over, no matter how many times I've heard it over the previous months, years, or decades.

iii.) I don't know how to publicize this site, and I don't feel like learning how, so I just sort of rely on word of mouth, or on people doing an online search for a certain band or song and stumbling over here. I've gotten comments on only one post (Feverdream) in the last four months, so I'm obviously not doing this for the praise or glory. My rule in life has always been something to the effect of "Don't let the size of your audience dictate the quality of your work."

iv.) Going back to the major-label topic, I obviously only give out independent-label, or no-label, or live, recordings. It's mainly because I don't want to get sued. It's not because I'm some Ian MacKaye-esque indie purist; most of my favorite bands have been on major labels for some amount of time or another, and those bands (Sonic Youth, The Church, Brian Eno, Miles Davis, My Bloody Valentine, Swervedriver, Faith No More, etc.) have had the biggest trickle-down influence on the indie bands that I like.

v.) Yes, Blogspot* is owned by Google, so it's quite a corporate thing, but I like the fact that it's entirely free, and the fact that if I were to get run over by a bus tomorrow, these songs would still be on here for all eternity. Whereas if one buys one's own URL / website, it has to be paid for annually, and so if you stop paying for it, it gets mothballed and all your work was for nought.
* Google is changing the name Blogspot to the fantastically lame Google Blogs any day now. Sad.
** I recommend Ixquick over Google, though I'll admit I do use Google more often.

vi.) For over a decade, I would just email mp3s to people I knew online, so this site offers a better-structured way of doing that. In the mid-'00s, I got really enraged by hype-based blogs that turned mediocre bands like Arcade Fire and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah into stars overnight, so I vowed that if I ever did a music blog, it would be totally different.

vii.) The "Planets with similar climates" section of each post is the part about which I am secretly the most proud. As for how I came up with that phrase, it happened during a late-night brainstorm session. I told myself I had to come up with something better than "RIYL" ("Recommended if you like") or "Similar songs," and the phrase "Planets with similar climates" popped into my head rather quickly. It was a pretty cool moment; you should've been there.

viii.) I want people to put songs from Blowtorch Baby up onto YouTube. YouTube is always my first choice when trying to hear some obscure song.

ix.) I often do slight modifications to posts over the ensuing day or two after making them. If I edit / modify something at a later date than that, I put "Update:" to introduce the new stuff.

x.) It may look like I often mess up when assigning a year to a song, but that's because I give the year in which it was recorded, which is often a year or more before it gets released.