An Announcement
How's it going?
This thing you're reading here has been in my draft folder for a long time and has gone through various versions, many of which were very lengthy and read more like explanations to myself rather than to you. Other drafts were comprised of rumination on failed pasts, and I got rid of those in short order as well.
I decided, in the grand scheme of things, this announcement isn't very important in terms of global or geopolitical influence. So I thought we'd just cut to the chase.
Here it is: On March 29, 2017, on its five-year anniversary, I'll be retiring Song Of The Day.
This decision was made, in internet terms, a long time ago. I started wondering in the spring of 2015 when I'd move on from SOTD. I wasn't ready to stop it back then. I wanted to come to a point where I felt like I could call it "finished."
Five years seemed like a respectable amount of time to say I published something every single day without interruption. I casually tossed that idea around for a few months. Sometime around the holidays last year, I finalized the decision and made it the plan of record.
That, officially, is how long ago this decision was made: nine months, almost ten. I managed not to tell this decision to anybody except my wife, and even she forgot about it until she saw me typing this very note here.
I was going to spill the beans last March on the four-year anniversary, but having that hanging over the blog for one whole year felt unwise. I also wanted to come up with a better idea of how the final weeks of Song Of The Day were going to go. Just dropping the whole thing, waving and ducking out didn't seem like a generous way to exit.
And yes, of course, I wanted to leave enough time in case I changed my mind. I didn't.
Once I sketched out the endgame, I put September 29 on the books. Six months' notice seemed reasonable. For administrative reasons I moved the announcement up one day, and here we are.
There's one big reason I'm doing this: time. There are a lot of things I'm doing now and many more things I want to accomplish. You've seen some of these projects -- mixtapes, radio shows -- on this blog for the last year or so. There's more writing. Much more writing. There are other things I haven't mentioned yet still in the dreaming phase. Others are farther along.
In any case, the structure of SOTD -- not to mention the compensation I receive for it, which over the course of nearly five years is almost enough for me to play one round on one of them high-class pinball machines -- has lent itself over to deadline-driven decisions and a preclusion of other, new ideas. Uh... don't know if you've noticed, but with the exception of The Hidden '70s, I've kind of been phoning SOTD in lately. Trust me, that won't be how I end it.
The blog itself, the house of SOTD, is not going away. It will, as you might expect, be drastically reformatted when the time comes. That'll be my big project at the beginning of 2017. The past SOTD's will always be accessible via some kind of structured archive.
What I write about when I write SOTD is still going to be something I write about. It's just going to take different forms and will hopefully be more entertaining. If I didn't think everyone would benefit from this change in direction I wouldn't do it. Now that I know what it takes to write something every damn day of your life, get organized, set up a calendar, order T-shirts, fight off Taylor Swift's advances, what have you, it's time to move forward.
I'll have more to say as the end date gets nearer that I'm sure will be emotive and heartfelt and very Vonnegutian, or at least very Brady, so I'll save some of my feelings for then.
For now I'll just say that the amount of love and respect Song Of The Day has gotten to this point means the whole world and a good hunk of the moon to me. I owe it to you to finish it properly. We got six months. Strap in and let's do something beautiful and stupid.
Thank you all from the bottom of my heart and everything else too.
Love,
Paul