Post 0: Welcome One and All (Except for that One Guy)!

   Hi there! Welcome to Cool Older Cousin, a new blog I’m creating to talk about music, partly because I like music, but mostly because I like talking… a lot. This isn't exactly going to be a music review blog; it’s mostly going to be me talking about different music that I like. So unless I specifically say otherwise, any songs that I mention on here are songs that I like and listen to, and therefore, by extension, you should too.

   When I was growing up, I listened to a lot of music, but it was mostly stuff on the radio. I have nothing in particular against radio, and I still like a lot of the stuff that I heard back then, but a diet made of classic rock and top nineties love ballads (I will never forgive Celine Dion for My Heart Will go on) does not make for a solid musical education. The music that I really ended up caring about came from older siblings and cousins, who would arrive at home with beaten up mix tapes that they had created by holding a personal recorder up to a radio, thereby creating some of the most lo-fi recordings I have ever heard, bar none. They were pretty much the coolest things I could even imagine when I was seven. I have vivid memories of hearing snatches of Monty Python, Metallica, Abba, and whatever else my elders were fancying that week, interspersed with pops and crackles (and occasional muffled shouts when people forgot to turn off the recorder once the song ended).

   As I grew up, the mix tapes became more polished and eclectic, but it was always exciting to find new music every time someone came to visit. A couple of years after that I discovered the internet and stopped communicating with people in the real world, but I still love finding out what the people whose musicals tastes I’ve pilfered over the years are listening to currently, and I guess the point of this blog is to pass that feeling along to other people: The chance to find strange, cool music that you haven’t heard or that you forgot about, all from the soothing location of your own monitor.

   So yeah, welcome to my music-talking-about blog! I’m planning on posting something every Friday night starting on March first, so anyone reading this can expect to be regularly edified to my musings. As a side note, anyone who read my last blog might be wondering if I’m going to be saying funny things here. At this point, I don’t know! I started I’m not Longwinded mostly because I wanted to write stupid and funny things where people could read them, and I think I succeeded fairly well at it (especially in the former area), but I made Cool Older Cousin mostly because I like music, and I wanted to create a place where I could about it a bunch at a relatively captive audience.  I’d like to think that some of the posts will be funny, but mostly they will be long navel gazing diatribes about just what a great song Hey Ya is (it’s so great, by the way. If you think otherwise, you are simply and incontrovertibly wrong). Are you excited? I AM EXCITED.

  LET'S BE EXCITED TOGETHER, FRIEND.