Don’t Forget To Write

Portrait of the author as a squinting, confused man.

Ever had Blogger’s Block?

I’m not sure if I have it, because it’s not like I don’t know what to write about or that I’ve lost the ability to write or anything. It’s just the blog is getting, well, neglected a lot of late. Some of you (Gawd bless you) have noticed this and have asked me when am I going to put up another entry. This makes me feel awesome by the way, but it also makes me feel guilty. There was a period, about a year ago, when I was writing something every day. Then, when the Todd book came out, I was doing a lot of excerpting and background stories about that. I really took to thinking of this blog as a magazine, and I would spend half a day or even a whole day putting together coherent thoughts, finding unlicensed photos and YouTube links to show you.

That's me selling my Todd book at the BBC.

I love doing that. So why haven’t I been doing it lately?

I think one of the problems is the nature of freelancing. It’s a weird market out there for writing, people aren’t buying the cows when they can aggregate the milk for free. And I am a cow. Or rather my writing is my cow. Okay, let’s drop the bovine analogy. The bittersweet truth of me doing this blog is that it is the easiest thing in the world, and often gives me the most satisfaction of any writing I do. On the other hand, I sometimes feel that everything I write here for free is one less idea I could be out there getting paid for. AND YET, if no one is buying that stuff, then why not do it here. This little conversation plays in my head for a while, which becomes three days, which become a week. Which becomes a month. So there’s that.

I think another issue that I tend to think that my writing here has to resemble a fully thought out, somewhat polished ‘essay’, you know something that could be, in a pinch, spoken on a lectern as a speech. This is a paralyzing myth. And while I love my mind most of the time, its ability to regenerate paralyzing myths is not one its more attractive features.

At the home studio of legendary San Francisco journalist Joel Selvin.

Then there’s another question: Does this blog even matter?

I think that one of the things I have tried to do here, vis-a-vis that “magazine” analogy, is to make my blog feel like a news source. This is where I have been wrong, Pulmyears Music Blog is never going to compete with Pitchfork or Crawdaddy or Stereogum or ….you name it. But that’s not what this thing is best at anyway. I have noticed that, much to my intellectual chagrin, the blog entries that get the most reaction are the least newsy, and inversely the more personal ones. The death of my friend Mimi. A cherished childhood memory of my dad taking me downtown to get a Beatles album. How humiliation forced me to learn the guitar faster. Where I was the night John Lennon died. I have received tons of pats on the back for these ones, which were actually the least relevant to the news of the day.  So that tells me something. It’s not so important that The Pulmyears Music Blog be good journalism, there’s a heckuva lot of that around already, but it is important that it be from my heart. I think the personal is often universal when you’re dealing humanly with humanity. That’s what my favourite writers have tried to do, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. comes to mind as a great example. This isn’t Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. – it’s a tiny little writer’s blog about music and musical thoughts. And maybe it doesn’t have to be a big researched presentation every time. Maybe I can just drop some personal stuff down here, whether it’s heavy and profound or just light and amusing.

It’s not like they can fire me.

So there you have it, I am gonna try and remember to write more often. Maybe no one is reading it anyway, which wouldn’t be so strange if you think about it. But if getting to know me through this channel is okay, you are totally welcome to come along for the, um, ride. Such as it is. And please, if I strike a chord with you, do leave comments in the comment slot, unless you are a Russian porn site or peddling some other troubling mishigas.

Oh and you can always find me on Twitter @pulmyears – which is why I’m not here more, to be honest.

Thanks for reading me, please come back again soon.

Paul Myers, Berkeley, CA.

Click here to order my newest book A Wizard A True Star: Todd Rundgren In The Studio (Jawbone Press)

Jimmy Fallon has a copy, do you?

I am also the author of It Ain’t Easy: Long John Baldry And The Birth Of The British Blues of which Cameron Crowe said “Paul Myers’s masterful book is a roller-coaster ride through the era, complete with all its chaos, glory and fortune. Rock on, and turn it up!”

Praised by Cameron Crowe, Andrew Loog Oldham and Randy Bachman!

and I also wrote  Barenaked Ladies: Public Stunts Private Stories the only Authorized book about BNL

Back when there were five...