Liner Notes (February 9th, 2025)

This week’s newsletter has thoughts on stepping back from social media and revitalizing my personal blog. There’s also some commentary on music I’ve been enjoying recently and this week’s supporter Q&A post can be found here.

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A Few Things

One of the things I told myself at the start of the year was that I could not let myself get sucked back into the absurdity of the current American political climate and let it dominate my life. In 2016, I spent an unhealthy amount of time doomscrolling, perpetually worried, and feeling like I needed to know what was happening at all times. It put me in a bad place mentally. Over the past few years, I’ve been working my way out and trying to do the work needed to be able to have a healthier relationship with the news and the general anxiety I feel about the state of the country and, hell, the world. Part of this is setting boundaries regarding when, where, and how long I can spend following the news. I’m limiting myself to spots in the day where I can check in briefly and see what’s happening. I mostly use our community’s political thread as the place to do that. Then, I’ll do a deeper dive into the news at the end of my day when I catch up on all my RSS feeds during my general reading part of my evening. This, so far, has worked for me. It’s also had a secondary benefit of keeping me off social media and dramatically reducing the time I’m on any of the platforms, specifically the text-based social media sites, and double-specifically staying off the one owned by one of history’s greatest tools. (Pretty fucked up that you’re not quite sure which one I’m referring to, right?) As I’ve written about in the past, those kinds of websites feel, at best, like a net negative in my life. I’m never getting much value out of them. And more than that, I have zero desire to want to post or create anything for them. Simply stated: I do not want to put any effort into writing for them. I am never motivated to post something on them and want to spend less time on them. Combine this with my wanting to replace the doomscrolling with more productive habits, and I’ve been looking for fun, personal projects to put my time and energy into. One of those is that I’m writing a menubar Mac app to scrobble to last.fm and give real-time updates to my Now Playing desk toy. I’ll share more on this in the future. (It’s currently in its very early stages, and teaching myself Mac development will be a journey.) I am also spending a lot of free time working on my first love, Chorus.fm. Over the past week, I’ve put a lot of effort into re-thinking the “author” pages on the website to refactor them into, basically, a blog-within-a-blog. The idea being that as I move further away from social media, I can move to where I do enjoy writing/posting content: my website! I repurposed an out-of-use domain name to redirect to my blog page: chr.us and made quite a few changes. I made them look better on mobile and added new photo blog and micro blog features. I also added author-specific “blog tags” to the bottom of blog posts so that you can easily see all the posts one author tagged. This way, when I post my weekly Top 9 or start sharing more photos of my record collection, I’ll be able to keep everything nicely organized. I also updated My Archive with quick links to these recurring topics. I also fixed some annoying issues with our RSS feeds. (If you see any RSS issues, like articles not updating, please reach out to me.) With these changes, I’m looking to find the “fun” of blogging again in all its various forms. Posting things for me. Posting photos for fun and posterity. Sharing random thoughts or random images with no thought to follower count or feeling gross about the platform I’m sharing it on. I made a simple little Shortcut on iOS that I can quickly post from and, so far, I’m enjoying this freedom and return to the simplicity of how I felt with the early web. I wrote a simple script to post some of these blogs to my social media accounts, and I plan to let all of those continue to exist, but I pinned a post on them saying I won’t be checking them or updating them much going forward. It’s a small thing; maybe even a hopeless battle in the sea of what the internet has become, but I’ve been having a lot of fun working on the project. Feel free to follow along, either with a good ‘ol fashion bookmark or RSS.
As we continue to get settled into our new home, I’ve been enjoying going through some of the things I’ve had in storage for years and seeing if there’s stuff I can get out and display now that we have more space. I finally framed this signed New Found Glory drumhead, which I’ve wanted to do forever. I was very happy with FrameMyCollection and will absolutely use them again in the future. Now, I just need to figure out which wall on my office this will go on.

Music Thoughts

Underoath’s new album announcement is coming next Friday, so, while that was one of my most played albums of the last week, first impressions on that will have to wait until next week’s newsletter. It’ll be a day-one preorder for me.
FRND CRCL released a new single, and it’s yet another super solid entry from these guys.
My favorite new album from the week is the new one from Matt Nathanson. It’s very much in the same vein as his previous, but he does this sound so well. I love his songwriting and find his specific brand of storytelling in his songs so engaging.
I spun The Weekend’s new album, Hurry Up Tomorrow, and it’s undeniably strong. There are lots of really great songs here. Maybe not as immediate for me as his last album, but I think a big part of that is that it’s just so damn long. I know in the world of streaming, this has become the new normal, but I find this trend of monster-length albums super detrimental to the album listening experience. I find myself not as likely to want to start an album with 20+ songs on it because I know I will probably get exhausted with it before the end. As an album listener and a usual “if I start it, I want to finish it” kind of listener, I have a really difficult time with this fad. And, because of it, I’ve spun the albums less than I probably would have otherwise. I think it’s one reason why I never quite got into the last Taylor Swift album as much as I would have if it was just a nice tight 12 or 13-song album.
Grayscale released The Hart last week and continue their excellent run since Nella Vita. They have such a nice lane with this style of pop rock and they still toss in a few new wrinkles with each album. The ballads on this one, especially “Mum II,” are great touches. I foresee this sitting in rotation quite a bit this year; it’s a perfect put-on in the car while running errands with the wife kind of album.
I got on a bit of a Set Your Goals kick last week. I adore Mutiny!, but damn if This Will be the Death of Us isn’t just about as perfect of a pop-punk album as you can make. Full of energy and just absurdly fun.

The Stats: Over the past week, I listened to 26 different artists, 35 different albums, and 355 different tracks (437 scrobbles). Here is my Top 9 from last week, and you can follow me on Apple Music and/or Last.fm.

Entertainment Thoughts

We finished the second season of Silo and quite enjoyed it. Been fun to see what and how they’ve adapted these books. I was curious what they would do with the second season given what the second book was mostly about, and it looks like the third season is going to tackle a lot of that book. It’s going to be very interesting to see how they pull that off while also letting us stay connected to the characters we’ve come to know and follow through two seasons.
Next up is Shogun. Three episodes in and I can already tell this is going to be very much in my wheelhouse.

Random and Personal Stuff

I know a lot of people are out at Super Bowl parties today, so I hope everyone is eating lots of chips and dips and enjoying themselves. We went out with some friends last night to drink beer and throw axes. My college roommate’s wife has wanted to try axe throwing for years at this point. I think she mentioned it on her birthday right before Covid hit. And now, years later, we finally did it. I went in with zero expectations but had fun. The idea of drinking alcohol and then being handed a sharp object to play with is a little weird. But throwing said sharp object was oddly satisfying.

Ten Songs

Here are ten songs that I listened to and loved this week. Some may be new, some may be old, but they all found their way into my life during the past seven days.

Matt Nathanson – Vampires
Grayscale – Through the Landslide
FRND CRCL – Dream Guest
Ava Max – Lost Your Faith
Florrie – Kissing in the Cold (Acoustic)
LS Dunes – Violet
Set Your Goals – The Fallen…
Taylor Acorn – Greener (Acoustic)
Paramore – Hello Cold World
Autopilot Off – Wide Awake

This playlist is available on Spotify and Apple Music.

Community Watch

The trending and popular threads in our community this week include:

The most liked post in our forums last week was this one by Importer/Exporter in the “General Politics XII” thread.

Previous editions of Liner Notes can be found here.

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