I Write About Music Just for the Fun of It

I love music. Unfortunately, I don’t play any instruments. I can’t sing either. The only thing I can do is write about it. As of this writing, I have penned 1,308 pieces on music.

When I created my personal blog in 2003, I needed content. Music was one of the topics that I was passionate about since I listened to music all the time. As someone who spent most of his time on the web and making a living off the web, I had access to music.

One of my goals for starting my own blog was to hone my writing skills. I wanted to take on the challenge of writing something I didn’t know anything about. I reviewed music without any music training and without injecting myself into the albums. I wrote about the vocals, the productions, and the techniques. Each review would take me 2 to 3 hours to write. I had to do research to find the vocabulary to convey my thoughts.

Taking a jazz appreciation course at Vassar College helped a great deal. I learned to listen to the art of improvisations. I held that technicality as standards even though I also wrote about hip-hop and Vietnamese music, in addition to jazz. Vietnamese music was where my heart was and I was very critical of trendy records with unimaginative melody and cheap lyrics.

In 2015, after 11 years of writing about music, I got burned out and called it quit. The format took too much of my time to write, but then I didn’t really quit. I wrote less reviews and my pieces were shorter. Furthermore, I only wrote what I wanted to share. I wrote for myself. When I first started, I wanted to focus on the music, but now I am doing the opposite. I put myself into the reviews.

My music writing gets more personal than before. I use the albums as a starting point to inject my own personal life into them. As I am listening to an album, I start to write in my head. Once I listen to the album long enough, I can just sit down and finish it in less than an hour. I am enjoying it more this way.

If you would like to read my music writing, head over to my blog. That’s where I post all of my writings first before sharing them on social media platforms.