Over the past eight months I’ve written a lot of stuff. This is my 185th post since April. All told my word count is somewhere around 107,489. Not that I checked. Kari put together this word cloud for me so I could see what I talked about the most and what kind of language I used most often. I think it’s pretty interesting.

The first thing I noticed was that only one band name and one venue showed up in the word cloud. It should come as no surprise that the band is Chaperone and the venue is Schubas. Many times throughout the year I thought, “Maybe I should just call this blog a Chaperone fansite.” I even stole the title of this post from an email Miles sent me. My love for that band is limitless, and I do hope that some of the writings I’ve done on them have pointed at least a few people their way. And Schubas…well, I don’t know what I’d do without Schubas. We picked our apartment based on it’s proximity to Chicago’s finest music venue.

The other thing that strikes me about the word cloud is that there are no negative words anywhere. I’m happy to see that, because my philosophy on writing this blog is this: If I don’t have good things to say about a band, I’m not going to write about them. The only people I ever write anything bad about are established artists that I feel have potential, but squander it trying to appeal to the masses. For a young band starting out, there’s nothing to be gained from a bad review or even a half-hearted endorsement. Therefore, I try to be very selective about what I write.

Sometimes things hit me, like Sons Of An Illustrious Father. I want people to go listen to their record, so I write a bunch about it. On the other hand I might hear something that I shrug off or think its just meh. I don’t write about those because it’s a waste of my time and the reader’s. So words like “great,” “like,” “love,” all end up on the cloud while words like “crap,” “terrible,” and “boring” are saved for my own personal thoughts (or reviews of that Beastie Boys record).

Whether you appreciate the philosophy or not, that’s the way it is. So, if you’re a band out there that sends me your music and you wonder why you never heard back or saw anything on the site, there’s your answer (except if you sent it in the last month, in which case I probably haven’t listened to it yet).

2011 was a great year for writing about music. I hope 2012 brings all the best for all of us.