A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs

Transcript This is just a note to let everyone know what's happening over the next few weeks. As I said a few months back, I'm taking a break after episode one hundred and fifty, which I'm uploading at the same time as I upload this, in order to get a backlog of episodes done. There won't be another new episode up for at least a month, possibly longer, as I'm going to get a backlog of four episodes written, recorded, and edited before I release the next one, so that I know I can keep to a regular schedule. When the podcast comes back, those four episodes will go up weekly, and I am *hoping* that that will be the case from then on -- but by taking this time to prepare a backlog, I will also know what regular schedule I *can* do. It might be -- it almost certainly will be -- an episode every week, but it might be three weeks on, one week off, it might be every other week, it might be four times a month with skip weeks, but you'll be able to predict exactly when it'll be. If it *is* three weeks on, one week off, or every other week, I'll still also make sure I do *something* for my Patreon backers in off weeks -- once the podcast restarts, backers *will* get a bonus podcast every week, whether or not the main podcast is up then. Whatever schedule it is, though, it will be a *regular* schedule, which the podcast hasn't had for eighteen months, because I'll no longer be running on a treadmill that's going faster than I can keep up, and I'll be able to upload episodes in advance and schedule them, and I'll be able to do work in blocks -- so if, as has happened in the past, I have to put off recording a couple of days because of roadworks outside, and then Tilt has to leave the editing a couple of days because of a health problem, that won't mean the episode goes up four days late, because we'll be working a month ahead. That kind of leeway is what I had for most of the first two years of the podcast, and it's what I lost when I was hit with a whole bunch of catastrophes in late 2020 and throughout 2021. Episodes from this point on are also going to be, in general, shorter than they have been for the last few months. 1966 and 67 is a period where I had to cover a *lot* of ground, adding in new backstory while also moving the story forward, and where nearly every episode had to introduce a whole new style of music *and* a piece of relevant social or political history *and* the biography of an artist *and* their connections to other parts of the story. For most of the next fifty episodes, that won't be the case. There will be other long episodes in the future -- I can think of half a dozen episodes in the next fifty that will require lengths of over ninety minutes as I tell multiple stories, and no doubt more will turn up. So the way I'm planning to do this is to work on four episodes at once. In each batch of four there will be one long episode -- say, twelve thousand words, the same length as the "Respect" or "Eight Miles High" episodes. There will be two six-thousand word episodes, the same length as, say, the "My Girl" or "Mr. Tambourine Man" episodes. And then there'll be a fourth which could be shorter -- three thousand words like the very earliest episodes -- or longer, depending on how much time I've had to spend on the others. So that should be an average of thirty thousand words of script a month -- the same length as the Beatles episode I'm uploading now. A pace that should be achievable, that should mean those who like longer *and* shorter episodes will be happy at least some of the time, and that will hopefully allow me to stick to a schedule. So you can expect at least a month with no new regular podcast episodes, but this feed won't be empty. Two weeks from today I'm going to start another of my Pledge Weeks, where for a week I'll put up one old Patreon bonus episode a day. These are things that my backers have already heard, a year or so ago, and it's to encourage new backers to take the plunge -- there's a lot more where that came from. Two weeks after that, I will be doing two Q&A podcasts. One will be for questions from the general public, which you can ask in the comments to this post at 500songs.com. The other will be for backers only, and I'll put up a post on Patreon for people to ask questions there. There'll then be a break of at least another two weeks, and episode one hundred and fifty-one should be going up some time in early August. While I'm taking this time off -- which is not really time off, I'll be working to build up the backlog -- I'll also be working on proofreading, editing, and typesetting the book version of episodes one hundred and one through one hundred and fifty, which should be out fairly soon and certainly won't be as delayed as the second book was. Thank you all for listening, and join me again in August, as we return to the summer of love. Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair.