Okay, just who is Bright Eyes’ PR guy? Cause he’s certainly earning his gruel this month. Conor Oberst’s watery eyes are inescapable on the newsstands now – check out cover stories in Harp, Filter, Under The Radar, Seventeen, Tiger Beat, Non-Threatening Boys… and now I’ve put him as the lead item in my final post of the year! Very crafty Mr PR Man, very crafty. You win this round, you magnificent bastard. Well, since ’05 is looking like it’s going to be the year of Bright Eyes, I may as well get on the bandwagon now.

You know, when I look at the sort of dreck that Rolling Stone has been covering all year, and then look at their writers’ year-end lists, I almost feel sorry for them. I don’t doubt that these guys have good to great musical taste, but are stuck reporting on Lindsay Lohan’s nip slips and Paris Hilton’s abortion of a singing career (take THAT Google spiders!).

Metacritic presents their top-scoring albums of 2004 along with a bit of a site facelift.

So another year has come and gone… I shrugged off doing any sort of wrap-up last year, but am feeling in the mood this time around – you know, like those form letters you get from relatives around the holidays talking about how little Bobby had his first tooth, Amanda got the lead in the school play and Uncle Leroy might make bail this time? Let’s do it categorically, shall we?

Musically (and that’s relative to me, musically, not music in general), it was a bit of a disappointment. My band kind of staggered from the start of the year and finally crashed and burned in October. Okay, that’s a bit melodramatic, but it was still sad to see it all end after almost three years. It’s not quite over yet, as the album we recorded is still due out next year sometime, but for me it’s a final document. Ironically, being band-less has been the most creatively liberating thing to happen to me in a long time – it’s now just a matter of finding a proper outlet. Finding a new band has been a mildly frustrating experience but things are looking up for 2005. More on that as it develops. And music in general? In numbers – 167 CDs purchased this year, 52 concerts attended. Madness.

Personally – a bit of an up and down year. I had a wonderful flood in January, turning my apartment into a serene reflecting pool. Amazingly, there was no permenant damage to anything – just an unbelievably stressful day. That whole mortality thing also smacked me right in the face when barely a week after that, one of my close friends from home was in an auto accident and left in a coma for almost two months. He’s doing really well now – just went out with him on Wednesday – but it was touch and go for a while and truly one of the scariest things I’ve ever been through. After years of being teased for never leaving the downtown Toronto core let alone the 416, I finally got some travelling done venturing to Las Vegas, Vancouver/Victoria/Seattle and Chicago in three separate trips. Hardly world travel, but still quite an achievement for me. What else… not too much. Work is good. My brother got engaged. I grow weary of basement life but will be addressing that in the Spring one way or another. I’m turning 30 next year and planning a good old fashioned freak-out of biblical proportions. It’ll be grand.

Oh, and I got my wisdom teeth out. Ouchie.

And the blog. Up until about mid-January, I just plugged along, doing my thing, when all of a sudden my traffic spiked on January 19 when I was nominated for two Bloggie awards. As I said at the time, that was the first time it really dawned on me that people actually read this thing and while I won’t necessarily changed the way I went about this thing, I will admit that I appreciated the attention and began taking it that much more seriously. Since then, my average traffic has more than tripled, the amount of time I spend on this blasted thing has also gone up not insignificantly, and it’s really now a second full-time job. But you know what? I don’t mind one bit – this thing has introduced me to all sorts of great music and people and the days that it seems more like work than fun are few and far between. I think I missed posting all of two days this year, which really speaks more to my obsessive-compulsive disorder rather than any sense of dedication. Regardless, I trundle on and fully expect to do so through 2005 unless I, like, get a life or a girlfriend or a puppy or something. But until that day, my pathos is your gain! Dig in!

But seriously, I love you guys. Thanks for making this fun and worthwhile and I’ll see you in 2005. Cheers.

np – Spiritualized / The Complete Works Volume Two

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