MWE 2021: Filling The Blanks
Finishing the vacant slots in discographies for the sake of completion.
Hello, everyone! Welcome to the very first post on this Substack! I’m hoping to have this thing updated pretty consistently, even if I never give it a set schedule. It was hard leaving my old blog Musical Meanderings behind, but I think this is going to be better for me in the long run, as it’ll allow me to write in my usual style while expanding it in a way that feels less performative and more matter of fact. Plus, it’ll keep my thoughts more personal and focused on my friends and followers rather than opening them to strangers who will try to complain to me in my comments. That’s always a plus.
Every year, music journalist Gary Suarez (@noyokono) hosts an annual music writing event where every February, he offers the challenge to listen to an album you’ve never heard and write about it every day of the month. The purpose of the exercise is to give people the chance to check out music they’ve otherwise missed out on, building writing skills as you offer your perspective on music that maybe was past your time or gives you a unique perspective all these years later.
I’ve participated in this in past years, and they’ve always been a treat to go through. It helps me discover new favorites and explore artists who I otherwise have a laundry list of material to get through. But this year is going to be a bit different for me. Obviously, the first step is going to be in using this Substack as my writing hub. But there’s also a bigger reason as to why this year is gonna be a bit different. You see, I’m in my last semester of college. I’m doing a lot to prepare for my future, and part of that means I don’t have as much freedom to dedicate myself to something like this as much as I could in years past. Even then, I’ve had days where unexpected circumstances make me fall behind or get to that day’s album really late. Especially this year, I don’t think I can write about an album a day because not only would I get burnt out by it, I’d also not be giving it enough time to really let it sit with me and give me a truly unique perspective on the album I’m writing about.
So my solution is this: I will still listen to an album a day, but I won’t write about it on that day. In fact, I won’t write about any of the albums I have listed here until the first week has passed. I deliberately designed the order so that It’s segmented into three or four different discographies. This could be three albums for two artists and one for a third, or two albums for three artists plus one for a fourth. Once I’ve finished one segment, I will write about all the albums in one segment, specifically focusing on the discography, how the artist has grown from those albums, and what my overall feelings on them are. For instance, this first week, I will be going through three albums from American Aquarium and Eric Church, in addition to the remaining album from Janelle Monae I had not listened to in full. Once I finish the three American Aquarium albums, I will write my analysis on them. Same thing when I’m done with Eric Church. Once I finish my piece on Janelle Monae, that post will go up the Monday of that next week, acting as my first writing submission for MWE. It’s a bit of a process, but for time management and organizational reasons, this is going to be the best system for me.
Now, what about the albums I chose? Why did I decide to listen to three American Aquarium albums, three Eric Church albums, and one Janelle Monae album? Why The Electric Lady specifically? Why am I not covering every album from American Aquarium that I haven’t heard? My theme for this year’s MWE is simple: I’m filling in the gaps. There are a lot of artists who my introduction to them was somewhat late in their career. Maybe I heard a recommendation, or I heard they were releasing an album and didn’t bother checking out their back catalog for whatever reason. I do this all the time, which is maybe a bad thing if I want to take myself seriously as a music nerd, but again, I’m a college student. Music isn’t even my career. I can’t exactly dedicate myself so fully to it to impress basically no one. But I do like filling in the gaps and having a full context of an artist’s career, so I aimed to finish or make a dent in the discographies of artists I like. Eric Church is a discography I’ve been meaning to finish for a while, and with his new album Heart & Soul coming out in April, this is probably the right time to do it. I had listened to Dirty Computer and The ArchAndroid, but I hadn’t gotten to The Electric Lady due to being told it was her weakest album. I’ve been wanting to explore more of Aryeon’s albums for a while, same with Poets of The Fall. I was supposed to listen to my Gorillaz weak spot, the debut, before Song Machine: Season One came out, but I forgot to. Like a dunce. This is my way of rectifying that, and I want to see how the context of their previous albums affected my view of their back catalog. After all, your favorite album from an artist is usually the first one you hear from them. Not always true, but it probably will be with select artists here. So we’ll see.
Well, that’s about it! See you for the first MWE 2021 post on February 8th! We’ll be talking about American Aquarium, Eric Church, and The Electric Lady by Janelle Monae!