I worked out what I'm going to do with this

So I'm compulsive about signing up for new things and then not using them. Over the more than two decades that blogging has been a thing I've probably made more than twenty and not used them because there's something terrifying about the blank feed that could be anything.

I always want it to be Important. And in my brain the barrier between Important and Pretentious is at best semipermeable. I always work better with a structure or a challenge than without one, so I'm going to steal a challenge from somewhere. And it's this.

I got the book This Year by John Darnielle for Christmas, a collection of lyrics and notes for 365 songs, one per day for a year. The Mountain Goats have been one of my favourite groups for a couple of years now, in part because there is so much to them. So a challenge of writing an entry a day where I talk about the song and talk about other things as well seems at the very least like a fun way to try and write every day.

I'm also aware that I'm starting late, so at first these won't line up as I write them. I'll get there.

Anyway, this entry won't be related to a Mountain Goats song, but to start as I mean to go on here I wanted to include a music video anyway, so this is the Jordan Lake Sessions version of This Year, because that's what the book is called and because it's about as nice a piece of music as one can find.

JANUARY 10: oh, something to add. These entries are going to be barely edited. This is kind of a mod diary more than a polished thing, so anything I write here is fundamentally what occurred to me when hearing the song. My process will usually be to listen to the song once, read the notes and lyrics while listening to it a second time, then write the post while listening to it a third and probably fourth time. The rough immediacy is the point. The posts would probably be "better" if I were taking the time to edit, but better is not the point of this.