Sooooo I’m making some ch-ch-ca changes, not so much to what I do, but to where I do it.

I am a music obsessive, to the point of annoyance some might say but I don’t care.  I do what I do and from time to time I come to this blog to share with you the things that I’ve heard, things I’ve seen and things I’ve felt when listening to music created right here in Syracuse.  Syracuse, as city that for as long as I’ve been alive has had music, much of it original, that is every bit is good and often better than those national superstars with the high-priced tickets and tour buses.  I found that out on my first foray into local music on a snowy night on Westcott Street in I think 1981.  Underage in a funky bar I had my first taste of local music and It was glorious.   I’ve been chasing that dragon ever since and so many of you have been so kind to read what I write, typos and all, and like what I do here.

That all being said, the better part of my long winded, highly emotional, non-objective, comma spliced music writing will now be published over at CNYalive.com. This will get my words out to more people and hopefully I can do everything I can to draw more eyeballs to that location.

Those pieces will eventually end up here but by and large my music writing will be at CNYAlive for the foreseeable future.  There will undoubtedly be stuff here on the blog that is more “bloggy” in nature, so yeah, I need to ramp up the output.  I also promise to get back to my fiction writing.

So many people, mostly my age and older (don’t get me started) have said to me, “I never know what’s going on since the New Times went under.”

CNYAlive is your one stop shopping source for finding out where the live music is in Syracuse and the surrounding area and I share publisher Fred Reed’s goal of getting more readers over there and more bands making sure their events are represented.  My goal is to shine a light on what we have here and bring more people into the party in my own weird way.

Musicians: I don’t write reviews.  I’m not a critic.  I write love stories, love stories about the work you do, the effort you put in.  Please keep sending me your work to listen to so I can fall in love with it like I always do. (you know where to find me.)

Thanks to Fred Reed for the opportunity to help grow the CNYAlive platform. I am popping with ideas already.

Special thanks to Misse Thomas for thinking I’m good enough to do so and for just being Misse Thomas in general.  (If you know her, you know what I mean.)

And mostly thanks to you the reader for reading. I’m just getting warmed up..try not to get sick of me.

-John