Changing Course

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When I began this experimental project, I’d planned to write Rock & Roll album reviews, one album at a time. Upon taking some advice from a friend, I decided to write about one track at a time, instead of whole albums at once. The reason was that writing about one song at a time would allow me to generate more content, and pumping out content consistently is key to being successful here. The thing is: I don’t care very much about that. My goal was always to express myself, not gain subscribers.

I’ve always valued quality over quantity, and I feel my work is lacking the quality I originally set out to achieve. I could blame my own aptitude and ability (and I do), but I feel it’s at least partly due to the restraints I’ve put on myself by writing about one song at a time. Now, this could be an excuse to avoid taking responsibility for the poor quality, off-topic rambling I’ve been doing, but I now believe I should have stuck with my original plan and gone with my first instinct.

When I started my first “review”, I began writing an article about the Beatles album Revolver, but it was very long, and I didn’t think anyone would want to spend that much time reading it. As a Substack newbie, I may have been wrong about that. I’ve been on here a few months now, and I’ve seen some extremely lengthy posts (much longer than mine would have been) that plenty of people read and liked. Also, it has taken me three months to write about two albums that I would have rather spent a week or two on. I’ve always felt that writing for personal reasons should be fun and never feel like work.

The bottom line is that the approach I’ve been taking has not been working for me the way I’d hoped. Either I write too much about each track and go way off topic, or I’m underwhelmed and uninspired and don’t know what to say. I have decided to stick to my original plan and write about one album at a time. It has been taking way too long to finish an album writing track by track, and it has been causing me to procrastinate or not want to write. Even if I am writing only about records in which all the songs are worth listening to, let’s face it, not all songs were created equally. I have been struggling to give the same attention to each one. My goal has always been to express what these albums mean to me, the effects they had on the world, and how they contributed to the history of Rock & Roll as a whole. I believe writing about albums as a whole, not individual songs, will help me to keep it fresh, stay inspired, and motivated to write. I’m going with the flow of what my spirit is telling me.

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