The stamina I had starting this website seems today like an aberration. I began a new project in earnest, creating this site and writing a framework to further it, and it’s since completely stalled. I started other things in the meantime, hoping to fill the gaps between entries in the Greatest series, and those trailed off just the same.
I’d like to blame it all on a general lack of response and interest from my minuscule (but greatly appreciated) readership, but I know that’s not the case; I rarely do anything for an audience, and anything creative only needs to satisfy its creator to be a success. The sole reason for the failure of DogfishCrus’ first eight months or so (outside of a severe wrist sprain that made typing really aggravating for a while) is my hitting of a wall with the Greatest series. Nothing else was as enticing to pick up and write on, but everything else was easier, and so I froze. The prospect, writing about all of my favorite albums and trying to capture in my own words that eternal and ethereal greatness made by so many legendary creators, sounded incredibly fulfilling and was a breeze to start. After you get ten or twenty albums in, though, you start realizing the daunting nature of not only whittling a functionally infinite body of art down to a select few favorites, but the daunting nature of finding things to say about some of the most talked-about things in modern history. Sometimes an album is just good, right? How do you turn that into paragraphs that are anything close to a worthwhile read? I know that I can do it, it’s just the fact of doing it and then doing it again and again that makes me hesitate to reopen the pages and relisten to the albums.
I haven’t posted anything to this site in months, almost four months exactly, but there hasn’t been a week (in all honesty, there’s been days) where I haven’t wished I was making some progress or doing anything I could put here. I thought by now I’d have enough of a portfolio and body of work that I could start branching out and writing about things I enjoy outside of music, maybe even making video essays to try and capture a different audience or just to have audiovisual versions of the posts here, but there isn’t enough to even think about that yet. Keyword: yet.
There is a future for DogfishCrus despite all the negativity here. I’m not shutting the site down or anything. I do want to refocus, though.
- Latest Listening was a bad idea for a monthly series, mainly because it’s not a macro enough overview to stay interesting. I think yearly trends are much more worthy of thought, and so that won’t return until 2024.
- I’m looking to introduce a new series, Get Into, where I try to make accessible entries into artists that have sprawling or otherwise intimidating catalogs. Look out for the first one this week.
- The Greatest series needs a lot of work, and a lot of work it’ll get. It will be finished, but I won’t pretend it’ll be quick. Probably not this calendar year, probably within the next year.
- I want to do some more focused single album reviews, mostly to push me to listen to the backlog of new albums I haven’t touched.
- I have one specific thing I want to look at and might very soon, concerning a legendary band’s discography and how sections compare. Guess who it is if you can!
Thanks for reading this and for reading anything I’ve written. I don’t expect it and I do value it. I’ll do better to earn it going forward.