I’ll be the first to admit that I am notorious for working myself into an enhusiastic frenzy about something, diving headfirst into the idea, then suddenly abandoning it at the drop of a hat. So a year ago when I told a few friends and fams about this new audioblog that I was starting, they all politely nodded their heads in encouragement, likely thinking, “Let’s see how long this will last.” I’m just as shocked as anyone that I’m still maintaining and contributing to this site. It’s certainly not for the few dollars I receive every month in Amazon.com referral fees, or the handful of promos and CDRs that arrive in the mail every week or two. While I undoubtedly write out of the love for the music, what’s most rewarding about this whole audioblogging phenomenon is meeting new people every week – other writers, musicians, industry folks, and listeners – who share my enthusiasm and desire for healthy musical discussion, people from all over the world with whom I would feel entirely comfortable asking to crash on their couch for a night if I was ever passing through town. The following is a summarized history of the past year in floodwatchmusic.com, in all my self-aggrandizing glory.

My first post for this site was a year ago today, as I discussed a moment of musical trancendence with the band Lambchop. That first month also saw posts on one of the greatest film soundtracks ever recorded, an unhip and unpopular list of my ten favorite classical works, and I offerered a brief history of one of my favorite bands, the obscenely overlooked Juno.

In June, I showcased Earth, Wind & Fire for an entire week (days one, two, three, four, five), which proved to be immensely rewarding but a little exhausting. Predictably, I also went apeshit over the new Herbert record, compiled a list of my favorite summer songs when I was a teen, and uploaded my first ‘DJ’ mix, which I find a bit difficult to sit through now. There’s a first time for everything, I suppose.

July was a blurry nightmare, what with packing up everything I owned and moving from Boston to Providence during the second half of the month. I somehow found time to write about Philip Glass‘ soundtrack work and begin a new “Covers” feature that I still have trouble getting excited about and contributing to now; it seemed like a good idea at the time.

Once I had unpacked during the first two weeks of August, I posted my first ‘real’ autopsy of a track for Brand Nubian’s “All for One.” I also reviewed the newest box set from Tortoise and the sophomore effort from the Wu’s Masta Killa. Around this time I began to notice that people other than my friends were leaving comments here and there – were there more than ten people actually reading this thing?

I had a lot of time on my hands in September, so I made a Sonic Youth mix out of boredom, and I was shocked at the number of downloads it received. I also conducted my first interview, with Ev Olcott of 12RODS, who was patient enough to deal with my tech-geek blabbering. I began reviewing new metal releases with write-ups of Mastodon and Gojira, both of which made my Year-End List. Looking back now, I’m surprised I didn’t write more with that much free time, although I do remember spending most of my days working my way through the first three seasons of HBO’s The Wire.

The beginning of October was the start of an excruciating three-month stint of one of the worst jobs of my life, but fortunately, I had time to write during the workday. I performed autopsies of Smif-n-Wessun and Afu-Ra tracks, and digressed upon everything from drum ‘n bass pioneers Spring Heel Jack to Christian metalcore band Zao to my favorite jazz pianist, Andrew Hill (who sadly passed away recently). I spent a lot of time on the design of the site as well, adding an ‘Archives’ section, links to five of my current favorites, and reorganizing the categories (and yes, for me, these trivial design tasks take a lot of time).

November was a busy month, starting with the premiere of a hip hop mix that blew up my alloted transfer limit from the number of downloads it received, a list of my top five favorite bassists that actually kept me up at night, and one of my personal favorite posts, an autopsy of Marvin Gaye’s “Come Live with Me Angel.” I also decided to utilize my heretofore fruitless four years of music education to include notation for particular musical moments I wanted to emphasize in my posts. I received a healthy amount of hate mail from Lord Corgan’s minions as the result of an incredibly lengthy and somewhat scathing autopsy I performed on Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness (1995). Meanwhile, my day job was getting worse, so I took comfort in the music of Dimmu Borgir, much to my wife’s initial alarm and subsequent chagrin. It was sometime during this month that I realized that the most comments I received were from hip hop-related posts, so I made a note to begin shifting the focus of the site from bizarre left-field experimentalism to more relatable content. I preferred to think of it not as ’selling out’, but rather figuring out where my little audience was.

Like 95% of my fellow audiobloggers, most of December was spent compiling my Year-End Lists: I had my top ten favorites, my biggest disappointments, and what I really listened to during 2006. I also compiled a list of ten albums I never listen to, and posted features on Underworld and another favorite jazz pianist, McCoy Tyner. By this time my job was becoming unbearable, and I vowed to quit after the Christmas holiday.

Sure enough, I quit my job after the New Year and returned back to my old one, but with the transition came new ‘real world’ responsibilities and less time to write. So I began waking up before dawn and working on posts, resulting in features like the strangest moments on Ghostface’s Pretty Tony Album (2004), an Alice Coltrane tribute, and revisits of ’90s faves like Truly and Into Another. I pretty much spent the entire month listening to Lilys‘ Everything Wrong Is Imaginary (2006) and cursing myself for failing to include it on my Year End list of favorites from the month before.

February was a ridiculously busy month work-wise, so I didn’t have a lot of time to work on extensive, thoroughly-researched posts. To help remedy this, I started a Song of the Week category, featuring short reviews of a songs that I happened to hear that week and wanted to write about. Other posts for the month included the near-embarrassing favorite albums to air-drum along to, an interview with Jeff Ziegler from Relay, and an exhaustive autopsy of Ice Cube’s “Color Blind.”

March saw fewer posts but my most popular feature yet, an autopsy of the Juice (1992) soundtrack, which more readers were familiar with than I had expected. Instead of writing, I was spending a lot of time next door playing Guitar Hero 2, resulting in five songs I’d like to see on the next installment of the game. I also interviewed one of my musical idols, Eric Claridge from The Sea and Cake, which more or less made my whole month.

A rare bout of seasonal affective disorder had me listening to a lot of metal as April came around, so I listed the top ten stylistic traits that I love about the genre. I also started a new category titled “Beat Dissections,” with the inimitable Pete Rock as my first subject. This in turn led me into a daily Soul Brother phase which culminated in another DJ mix that again, proved more popular than I had anticipated. Other notable posts included my favorite Sade basslines and a request from Jeff and Joey to submit my Top 25 Favorite Hip Hop Albums, which I was more than happy to oblige; to my surprise, the list hardly took any time at all to compile, probably because they were my favorites and not my opinion of the all-time greatest.

And that’s about it, bringing me to today.

Those links in the sidebar are the most critical function of the site for me. Every morning, after checking my email, I use floodwatchmusic.com as a jumping station to my favorite sites; without them, my Bookmarks menu would be hopelessly disorganized and a headache to navigate through. I check all of them at least once every few days, but the following deserve a special mention as daily favorites and a continual source of inspiration for this site:

Angry Citizen, who was one of my earliest supporters. He’s a busy guy and doesn’t drop very often, but when he does, you can expect well-written reviews of live shows and great accompanying photos.

Dallas Penn is seemingly everywhere and anywhere at one time, and his posts often contain hilarity and insight in equal measure. The frequency with which he updates his warped genius is hands-down scary.

Destination: Out’s Chilly Jay Chill and Prof. Drew LeDrew, who are responsible for the best free jazz audioblog on the web.

Junior and the crew over at Earfuzz, who graciously allow me to drop a post over there once a month.

The guys over at Feed Me Good Tunes, who post whatever the hell they want, when they want, hipster quotient be damned.

From Da Bricks‘ Dan Love, whose direct, unpretentious writing style and enthusiasm is infectious.

Invisible Oranges and frequent Stylus contributor Cosmo Lee, whose writing on metal is knowledgable, level-headed, and remarkably clear; the guy is a huge influence on my own writing.

Nappy Diatribe’s Humanity Critic, curator of the funniest blog, like, evar.

Rafi and the crew from Oh Word, who continue to link to my posts even when they don’t involve hip hop.

My friend Mat, who maintains Olympus Mons, was pretty much the inspiration for why I started this site in the first place. Much love.

Passion of the Weiss‘ Jeff Weiss, who not only manages to drop a witty, insightful, and hilarious posts on a daily basis, but is also one of the coolest dudes ’round these internets.

Dart Adams of Poisonous Paragraphs lives and breathes Boston, he loves the Sox, and his knowledge of hip hop is peerless. How could I not visit his site every day?

I’ve praised him plenty before, but Scholar at Souled On Music continues to drop the most amazing music in his posts, some rare, some not-so-rare, but his commentary is outstanding regardless.

Lastly, Fresh over at 33 Jones continues to amaze me with his drops on the hottest mixtapes and other hip hop news items, and I love it how he takes the time to respond to every comment that a reader leaves on his site.

As always, thanks for reading and commenting, friends, and here’s to another year in this business.