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Blog of the Week: Last Year’s Girl
This week's Blog of the Week is the fantastic Scottish blog Last Year's Girl.
1. You manage to juggle writing the online content for a law firm alongside writing about music, and whatever subject piques your interest - how do you find the time?
Short answer... with increasing difficulty! And resource to lunch breaks. I tend to devote one day each weekend to sitting on the computer catching up with what I haven’t been able to get around to during the week, as well as plotting out a rough approximation of my content over the next week – it’s a routine I’ve only gotten into relatively recently, but it’s certainly helped to make my blogging more regular.
2. Tell us how you got started - we noticed on your site that you've been blogging as long as blogging!
Yes, but I have to stress that I would never have referred to my online ramblings circa 1999 as ‘blogging’..! I’ve always fancied myself as a bit of a writer, and I kept diaries through much of my childhood and teens. I can’t remember how I originally stumbled across the phenomenon of keeping a diary on the internet, for other people to read, but it seemed like a logical step. I started writing on a site called deardiary.net I believe before moving to Diaryland, then LiveJournal, and ultimately my own site (where I’ve been since 2005).
3. With so many music blogs out there, how do you keep your content fresh and different?
I think you touched on it a little in your first question – Last Year’s Girl has never been exclusively a music blog, although given it’s one of my biggest passions it’s a niche I seem to have stumbled into and the ever-growing Scottish music blogging community have been happy to embrace me as one of their own (perhaps everybody’s blogging grandmother?!). I post two, maybe three, music-related posts a week alongside other projects like my attempts to review every cake place in Glasgow, coverage of the thirty things I’m trying to accomplish before turning thirty and the odd piece of political rambling. The worry is that you tend to find the same bands sending the same things to each of us at the same times, and it can be difficult to figure out how to cover something you really like without replicating what one of your peers is planning around the same time. It’s happened a few times, particularly with band interviews. But I think every blogger in the ‘community’ has his or her own tastes – you won’t find the same raving about Bruce Springsteen or Ryan Adams on other Scottish blogs, that’s for certain.
4. When you first started was there anything special you did to spread the word about the blog?
Nah, in the late 90s there were only a couple of dozen bloggers and we all read each other for want of anything better to do. I think it’s fair to say that my audience grew organically through the first five or six years, across various sites, so when I set up on my own I already had a pre-made audience. And I was already fairly established by the time the blogging ‘explosion’ happened proper in about 2005/06. I know that’s a rubbish answer, but there’s really very little I’ve done to promote myself in the traditional sense beyond becoming a reader of other blogs, linking to them and leaving comments and hoping that the owners of those blogs will reciprocate assuming that they like my content.
5. With Twitter now a prevalent social media tool, has this changed the way you blog and promote the links on Last Year's Girl?
Well new posts are automatically sent to Twitter, which I think is the bare minimum that anybody does. It can be quite satisfying to see posts almost instantaneously retweeted, for example when I post my monthly mix CDs. I think the other thing that Twitter has changed is making it easier to share posts that you’ve maybe not had as much of a response to as you anticipated – if, for example, nobody saw a post you worked really hard on because it was the middle of the night you can reshare it in the morning when there’s a different audience around without looking as if you’re desperate.
I have quite a large following on Twitter, which again I think has more to do with me being an early adopter of the service than anything else, but it gives me a place to share links and other bits and pieces I find interesting that I would maybe in the past have chucked in on the end of a blog post they weren’t really relevant to just for a place to share them. My posts are certainly much more self-contained than they used to be. It’s also really heartening to see bands and artists you love sharing links to things that you’ve written on their own Twitter feeds and Facebook pages.
6. How do you go about tracking down new music?
Does it make me sound like a terrible person if I say I wait for a lot of it to come to me? Well, that and there are a fair few blogs I read and podcasts I listen to whose tastes I know overlap with my own and keep me clued up on stuff I might otherwise have missed. I download a lot of random mp3s I then forget about, whether from other blogs or my own inbox, and listen to a lot of music on shuffle when I’m working in the office or at home. It’s a system that means I often catch up with new stuff a good bit later than others – but I suppose that helps keep my content different, right?!
7. Are there any ABoF artists that tickle your fancy at the moment?
The Moth and the Mirror are, quite rightly, generating massive buzz at the moment – I’d go out on a limb here and happily say that Honestly, This World is one of the best albums I’ve heard by a Scottish artist this year. I rather shamefully haven’t yet listened to the promo you guys very kindly sent me of Rod Jones’ Birthday Suit project, but I’m pretty certain it’s going to be a cracker.
8. Who can you see making an impact on 2012 (signed or unsigned)?
Franz Nicolay (ex-Hold Steady) will be releasing his third solo album thanks to some Kickstarter funding early in 2012, and I’m really excited about it – which also gives me ample opportunity to shamelessly promote my first foray into gig promotion, which will be taking place in Glasgow on 2nd December when Nicolay plays the Old Hairdressers’ with Chris T-T and Dave Hughes (http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/205970). Kathleen Edwards, a Canadian alt.countryesque singer-songwriter who is one of my all-time favourites, will also be releasing a new album in January which I’ve been lucky enough to hear and it’s brilliant – it’s a bit desperate that the fact it’s produced by Bon Iver might finally be enough to get the indie blogs to sit up and take notice, but if that’s what it takes...
I also blog for the Scotsman’s Radar new music blog, and we have recently announced the winner of our second annual prize for Scottish unsigned music as the incredible Edinburgh band Sebastian Dangerfield. I also managed to call runner-up for the second year running in the form of shoegaze-folk act Bottle of Evil. Roll your eyes at the genre mash all you want, but it works.
9. Finally - top tips for running your own blog?
You need to make sure that you’re doing it because you really want to blog, not because you think it’s going to give you clout or get you freebies. The truth is there are so many bloggers these days that it is unlikely what you’re doing is going to be particularly new and different but don’t let that dishearten you – it doesn’t mean it can’t be great fun, and that you won’t get to meet some fantastic people.
On a similar note don’t worry about constantly being seen to be ‘cool’ or whatever because those zeitgeisty bands are likely to be getting covered elsewhere. If you write about what you love, with real passion, then you’ll find that likeminded people will want to come back.
Be social – link to other blogs, comment on others and join in the chat on Twitter!
And finally, get organised – if you can set aside some time to specifically devote to blogging a couple of times a week you’ll get a lot less stressed when you realise you haven’t had the time to post anything for a couple of days. The thing is (particularly if you’re a music blogger) if you’re not getting out and doing things you’re really not going to have anything interesting to write about, even if you have all the time in the world in which to do so.