One Chord to Another is now 20 years old. Which is nice. That’s a fairly long time to do anything let alone a music blog. This might not be very influential, viral or anything like that, but I’m still proud that I’ve been able to keep this going on for such a ridiculously long time. It often haven’t been very easy, because the day job takes so much time and energy. Last year and a half has especially been a hell of a grind, because I’ve felt like horseshit since March 2020. I got sick in the first wave, was never diagnosed, but it took me two months to be able to return to work. Not that I was ok even then and felt absolutely horrendous for six months and still don’t feel totally fine year and a half later. Of course it could be something else too, because there were no tests at the time. Anyway, in case you’ve been wondering why there has only been a playlist, that’s pretty much the reason. I just tried to get through the weekdays and then do the new music weekly on the weekend and repeat. Not that the blog part was the big grind. That’s actually the part that kept me sane in the midst of it all. Hopefully I manage to get my health back to a state where I could go to sleep fully convinced that I will wake up in the morning. Until that happens there probably won’t be much more than the new music weekly on the weekends. That will go on, because I love to go through the new releases each week and compile the playlist. It takes a lot of time from my each weekend, so one day I just might decide to stop. But as for now, I like the routine and I will continue making it.
There won’t be a big celebration this time around, but as you might have noticed, I’ve made a monster Spotify playlist of songs that I’ve loved during the 20 years of onechord.net. You’ll find that below. I’ve also posted some of those tracks here as blog posts. I will make a few more during Friday and Saturday. Probably mostly Finnish favorites, because I haven’t gone there yet and that’s where everything started. I don’t have time to write about all and you probably won’t have the interest to read about all. So this will go back to new music in a day or two and this nostalgic mumbo jumbo will go away at least for the next five years. And I hope you don’t take any offense, if you are not on one or both of them. I still love you and most likely just assumed that I had already added your song to it. These are not supposed to be complete. More like an example of the music that I’ve praised here during the past 20 years. I’m just way too unorganized to handle 20 years.
And finally a big thank you each and every one of you. I really appreciate all of you who listen and read what I do. Whether it’s regularly or occasionally. I’m sure there are bigger and better media outlets who do far better job covering new music than my one man hobby project ever could. So I do love that you follow my take off it all. Extra thank you for those who take the time to like, share, follow, comment and send words of encouragement. It matters a great deal, because I have masters degree in self-doubt and it’s so easy to get lost in all of this and start believing that I’m just sending songs and words into a void and nobody would care if I stopped. Not that I think that this doesn’t have value. I think it absolutely does. If I truly did feel like it doesn’t have any, I would have stopped ages ago. I’m not an excellent writer or great at putting things into a context, but onechordnet has never been about analytical music critique (that is important too and I love to read it). My strenght in all this is that fanlike passion and love to dig deep, cast a wide net and share music that goes under the radar of the bigger publications. One Chord to Another is nothing special, but there really aren’t too many places even globally that do what I do. Plus I have my own perspective that is different than someone else’s and I might see something that other blogger friends don’t and vice versa. Or perhaps we all see someone and together end up making an influence that is equal to bigger outlets. So even with all of its shortcomings, I do believe onechordnet does have some cultural value. I can’t be anything for someone like Isbell, but I can be someone for the artist that is just starting out and doesn’t have a whole lot of listeners. Even if my writing won’t bring that much listeners, it can matter that some guy on the other side of the world think that this song is beautiful, true and worth all the love.
Thank you and here’s to the next 20.