It’s Our Birthday

Today is our fifth birthday. In dog years we’re thirty five. In blog years we’re probably a hundred. Five years feels like a milestone.

The two questions I am asked the most about BIGSTEREO are why the name and why did you start.

The first question is easy. BIGSTEREO borrowed its name from the Tracy + the Plastics song “Big Stereo.” The song is about as personal for me as it gets for reasons I won’t bore you with. I’m sure for Wynne Greenwood it has an entirely different meaning, but that’s the beauty of music. We each get to create our own meanings and stories for songs. They become our own. And like our own stories, songs become even better when we share them with friends and family and even strangers.

The name is a good lead into the why. 2004 was a depressing year for a lot of reasons, but mostly because music was all about crappy indie-rock that had no soul and George W. Bush was elected for a second term. Plus, I was in a dead end job in a cubicle minefield doing something that I didn’t even believe in. There just didn’t seem to be a lot of hope for the future.

2004 was also a very good year because Tracy + The Plastics released Culture For Pigeon, perhaps one of the best albums penned to date, or at least penned in 2004 (don’t argue with me on this one, you’ll lose). The problem though was nobody paid it any attention. Well almost nobody. It didn’t have a huge budget so it certainly wasn’t getting press and the Internet was in love with the polar opposite – soulless indie rock. I knew there had to be a better way for great artists and albums and songs to get attention.

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Tracy + The Plastics – “Big Stereo”

The blog feels like a monster. A tame monster — but a monster none the less. It needs lots of love and nurturing and ego stroking — and it needs to be fed music daily. It’s definitely a third person, an entity of its own.

And like a proud parent, I’m proud of what it has accomplished so far. It has been featured in publications worldwide. It has thrown parties on half the world’s continents. It most recently started a record label. It has created 2,243 blog posts with 12,896 comments and has transferred 1.66 terabytes of data. It took five years, but it did it.

Yes, there are days when I want to pull the plug on this monster. But there are still more days that I just can’t get enough. And no matter what day it is I still do all all of this out of love. There is no big paycheck — heck, we’re lucky when we break even. But we keep going forward one foot in front of the other. Maybe others do it better and maybe we can’t write and maybe we lose site of the ball sometimes, but what we lack we make up in commitment and loyalty and, well heck, love.

So here’s to all the amazing people we’ve met on this crazy road. To all the amazing tunes we’ve heard. To all the amazing bands and artists who’ve been kind enough to share their talent with us. And here’s to five more (or thirty five more in dog years).