And In The Morning...

...I'll be here.

I've been a long time gone. No sure why except to say the muse left me. Has she returned? Not sure. Sometimes you just have to start typing and see if she lands on your shoulder.

Where to start? Well, below will see a post with a music mix I made at 8tracks.com, a site I just learned about last week. Check it out as it seems like a place for great fun and some great music. You can find all my mixes here. Go listen and hit the 'like' button. You'll also notice a link back to this blog, to my twitter feed, and to my last.fm account.  I haven't tweeted much though I am on twitter every day following the conservative political commentators I enjoy the most. The last.fm account is brand new as of last night. This site keeps track of any music you listen to on your laptop (and I expect from your smart phone, though I haven't checked that out yet.) I'm not the average 8Tracks user, a 53 year old man who loves jazz, classical, the great american songbook, etc. Most of the users are kids and the music they listen to is, in my book, music for kids. That's a nicer way of saying I think most of it is unlistenable. But with many hundreds of thousands of users and mixes, I'm sure to run across some good music, hopefully some good music made recently. Someone must be making some good music these days, right?

Also, what about spotify.com?  This is a terrific site for music lovers. It's big in Europe and just had its U.S. rollout last month. It's a place where you can find, for free, virtually any music you want. I've been using spotify for about a month and have discovered and rediscovered a lot of terrific music. In fact, I just tweeted one of my play lists, called "Radio Days," of great old 1970's Top 40 hits. You need to download the Spotify player to listen.  The free version of Spotify forces you to listen to adds every 6 or 7 songs but they are short and not too much of a pain. If you pay ten bucks a month you can get the full version, which gives you the music without adds and, more importantly, the smart phone app. I haven't pulled the trigger on the full version yet but it's pretty much inevitable at this point. I've got many thousands of songs on my iPod and on the Amazon cloud (so I can listen to my own music through my phone) but often I can't find anything I really want to listen to.

I've also created an account at tumblr.com, though I haven't explored the possibilities of that site yet. It appears to be a blog where you can easily load pictures, videos, text, etc. If that is all it is than I probably won't use it much but perhaps I'll link to my own blog through it. We'll see.

At any rate, I'm all set up to continue my blog. All I need now is someone to read it. I've been gone so long I don't even get spam comments anymore.

This post's title means nothing. Just an excuse to play this terrific Tom Waits tune:

[audio:I'llBeGone.mp3]