(This post was put up by our robot overlords at WordPress. I’m still on vacation. New posts will resume no sooner than Tuesday July 15.)
Four years ago today, this blog began. In music-blog time, that makes it about a thousand years old. Rather than make a big speech, I’ll jump right into the list of my favorite posts of the past year.
The single most popular post of the year came last August 12 on Vinyl Record Day, and featured the complete rundown on all the other bloggers who were participating in the day’s blogswarm. We’re planning to organize another one this year, so stay tuned for details. Another highly trafficked post featured the Beatles’ Christmas records.
We told some college radio tales involving the Eagles’ album The Long Run and my first program director’s gig. We revealed what goes through a DJ’s mind while he’s on the air in this airshift diary. We paid tribute to the late Chicago radio legend Wally Phillips, and wrote about King Zbornik, a Milwaukee DJ of the 1960s for whom radio was just one facet of his career.
We looked at the launch of Sputnik and the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy through our own peculiar lens. We imagined radio waves radiating eternally into space, and tried to imagine what these people were thinking. We went all scholarly on the subject of southern rock, but blew our scholarly credentials to hell when we applied the same sort of intellectual rigor to the Banana Splits and the Beagles, and to hit songs that started as TV commercials.
We got personal, telling about some of our guilty pleasures (here and here), about a crucial moment in our personal mythology, and about a legendary New York radio station that somehow decided we were just what they needed for their new website. We wrote about a great session that never happened: The Beatles recording at Stax im Memphis. We wrote about a gloriously romantic pop song from the unlikeliest of sources, and we took a drive on a hot summer night just to see what we could find.
And we continued to pompously overuse the editorial “we.”
If you go to these individual posts, you’ll find that the links to mp3s are dead. If you’re absolutely dying to hear any of the tracks again, leave a comment and I’ll do my best to re-up them when I return. And to all who visit this blog regularly, please accept my many thanks.
The Hits Just Keep On Comin' 
Congrats on four good years! I recall finding your blog in the days just after I discovered the world of music blogging itself (long before daring to start a blog of my own.) I spent a good number of days exploring your archives. Just like my regular stops here now, it was time well spent.
Four years? Wow!
I thank you especially for the last one year. In all the times during this past year, when I couldn’t even get enough wind in the sail to even look at my own blog, I’d regularly stop by yours. Always entertaining, informative and a high bar to reach for.