Unmitigated praise, anyone?

Ok, it’s been close to a month since my last post. Not that I am delusioned enough to believe that there is a breathless public clamouring for my thoughts, but there’s something about the widening gap between now and the last date posted that makes me feel obligated to say something.

Here’s what’s on my mind today: I choked.

Here’s what happened. I received this album about 6 weeks ago. I listened to it and I wrote what I thought was a fairly honest and sober review. Then I went to post it. A big thing about blogcritics is the revenue from Amazon. Each entry has at least one post to Amazon and each purchase that results from that linking counts towards blogcritics’s commission. When I went to post my review and list the link to the Amazon listing for this album there wasn’t one. So I emailed blogcritics owner, Eric Olsen. He said to hold off until the album was listed (it releases in January.)

Well, yesterday I got an email from the marketer for the album asking where my post was. I explained and suggested that he check with Eric. As it turns out this independently produced album may not get listed at Amazon. Eric told me to go ahead and list the review providing the artist’s web page as a place to buy the album.

In the flurry of emails about this issue, I noticed some from the artist himself. Now this buy has been at it awhile but he’s never made it big so his getting involved wasn’t that big of a deal in and of itself. It’s not like Bono was emailing me, eager for my review. But the thing that made me choke was that now I was sure that the artist was going to read my review. So, I promised to post my review and that should have been the end of it. Well, I went home and reconsidered the whole thing. I ended up writing the trite piece of cotton candy that you see through the link above.

I choked just because I knew that guy was going to read it and I didn’t want to be impolite!