A Thank You From Robin @ Breaking More Waves Blog

Happy New Year from Southsea, Portsmouth and the internet. The home of Breaking More Waves.

So that was 2017 then? 

It was, looking back, quite a difficult year for Breaking More Waves. Personal circumstances (my partner’s treatment for cancer, a very tough year at work where depleted resources gave constant challenges and pressures, plus working on the ongoing modernisation of my house that I moved to a couple of years ago) left little time for writing a blog. Still, I managed over 250 posts which is probably somewhere between 55,000 and 60,000 words. A lot less than every year except the blog’s first but still something to be proud of I feel. 

As I’ve said time and time before some people view a blog as successful if it’s making money or has lots of readers or gets lots of premieres given to it by record labels or gets lots of music industry recognition as a ‘tastemaker’, or has a well followed Spotify playlist, but that isn’t how I view success. My success is the pleasure I get out of writing Breaking More Waves – keeping it going is the real success for me. So maybe 2017 was actually the most successful year of Breaking More Waves considering the challenges. 

This summer Breaking More Waves will be ten years old. Ten. Imagine that. I’ve written this watching my children grow up and now one of them is at university! There have been deaths - I’ve lost my father and my partners father and mother in the time I have been doing this. There have been births with many of my friends starting their own families. There have also been a hell of a lot of other blogs going to the internet version of the blog graveyard - sadly this year one of my favourite blogs (and favourite bloggers in real life) Leigh Ecclestone from Just Music That I Like finished his blog. Thanks for all the posts Leigh and hopefully see you at a gig again soon.

Assuming that I do get to ten years (that’s in June – and I fully intend to get there) it feels like I should celebrate a bit more than just write my annual slap-on-the-back-well-done-another-year-post. I don’t know what I’ll do yet, but maybe I’ll throw some sort of party and you’ll all be invited. There would be good music of course. Watch this space.

Although 2017 was challenging in terms of finding time to keep Breaking More Waves going it’s been really good over the last year to have people say nice things to me about the blog both on line and in person. Those little tweets saying they really loved a track I’d posted or they enjoyed something I had written can be real motivators. Especially if I've been struggling.

So, I just want to say thank you to anyone who has read some of the crap I speed type onto my laptop in those spare 15 minutes I find at a work lunch hour or late at night when the day is nearly done. Thank you to anyone who has interacted with me on social media ( Twitter @BMWavesBlog and Instagram @breakingmorewavespics) and thank you to anyone who has recognised me at gigs and festivals and come and said hello / had a chat. And finally, thank you to all the musicians who make the music I write and post about. Without them life just wouldn’t be as good would it? If you want to hear all of the artists I write about I have a playlist on Spotify which I update at the end of every month with all the tracks from the previous month. December's is live now. You can find it by clicking here.

OK that was 2017.

Now it’s 2018.

Time to do more words about more music. Mainly new music. Very occasionally old music. But always that which I like, in the hope you do to.

Robin, Breaking More Waves.