20 Years of 3 Minutes and 49 Seconds

November 2023 marked the 20th(!) anniversary of my music blog, 3 Minutes and 49 Seconds. While it has definitely been a lower priority for me in the past ten years than it was for the first ten, it's still where most of my "published" writing lives. If you're interested, here's a history I wrote for the 5 year anniversary: https://3min49sec.blogspot.com/2008/11/5-years-brief-but-indulgent-history.html​

2023

Every year I make a compliation of some of my favorite songs. Here's the 2023 edition on Amazon Music Unlimited:

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In my last newsletter I included the wrong link to my write-up about The Beatles' new song. Sorry about that! Below is the correct one.

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Heroes for the '90s

I recently revived my look back at 1990s superhero comics with a plan to write ten more essays to wrap-up the project.

I've published two of the three essays that cover 1995, one on Green Lantern and one on the Justice League. You can read them at https://24pgs.blogspot.com/.

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What I'm (Looking Forward) To Reading

Instead of recapping what I've been reading, I thought I'd preview the books I'm excited to read in 2024. The picture of the "to-read shelf" on my nightstand tells most of the story, but not all of it. For one thing, there is a whole other layer of books behind the ones you see here. These include Gregory Maguire's Another Day trilogy, Elizabeth Hand's A Haunting on the Hill, and Funny Things: A Comic Strip Biography of Charles Schulz.

The Hopefuls By The Numbers

2024 marks the 20th anniversary of the release of Olympic Hopefuls' first album, The Fuses Refuse to Burn! While you chew on that for a moment, allow me to do some reflection.

Not only did 2004 see that album's release, but also Spymob's Sitting Around Keeping Score, Kid Dakota's The West Is The Future, and Alva Star's Escalator.

Thinking about that bounty made me realize that we're in a fallow period for new music from the four guys at the center of the Hopefuls collective. We were spoiled from 2014 to 2020 with an average of three new releases per year, but since then there has been only one full-length album (Vicious Vicious's Paradise) and a smattering of singles from Appelwick's collaboration project Citrine.

With Storyhill on another extended break, Eric Fawcett committed to a non-musical career as a therapist, Darren Jackson taking his usual time between albums (he teased a new Kid Dakota album two years ago), and Appelwick's elusiveness, it seems like this may be the new normal. But I really hope it's not.