Last week, I started writing on the Baltimore City Paper's new music blog, Noise, which I'll be posting on twice a week from now on. Music editor Jess Harvell has already been posting on there for a few weeks, and I guess I was a natural choice to help out with that, since I was actually recruited as a freelancer for the paper a couple years ago on the basis of my blog writing about Baltimore music. A lot of print publications have in the past few years started generating exclusive content for their websites like blogs, and for every really good, successful example (XXLmag.com's columnists, CP contributor Tom Breihan's Village Voice blog), there have been a lot of lousy or unnecessary ones, so I'm gonna really work hard to make the coverage on there interesting and probably more varied than the stuff I've done for CP in the past.

The subject of my entries will generally be local music, or live shows in the Baltimore area by touring acts, and concert reviews will probably make up roughly half of my posts. Gov't Names is so focused on letting people know what CDs are out and what shows are coming up that I never really figured out a format I liked for writing about the shows I do go to, so it'll be nice to have an outlet for that. I've been kinda laying low and not going to many shows the past few months, because of the cold weather and also because I've been adjusting to the new day job I started in October. But now that Spring is coming it feels like a really good time to come out of hibernation and start hitting up a lot of shows again. So feel free to give me tips on shows I should come out to, whether it's your show or just an act you think I'd dig.

But I'm also looking at this as an opportunity for a lot of little ideas that seem maybe too small to cover in CP but didn't quite fit on Gov't Names. For instance, my first couple posts were an episode guide to Baltimore music in HBO's The Wire, and the first installment of a monthly column on Baltimore club music called The Club Beat (the title is kind of an homage to Kelly Connelly's Street Beat column in Music Monthly). And each month I'll talk to a different club/DJ producer, starting with DJ Booman in the first post. I might link back to interesting Noise entries now and then, but probably not too often, so I'll tell you right now to bookmark http://www.citypaper.com/digest.asp?columntitle=Noise and check it out a couple times a week, if you already do that with my other blogs.

Labels: Baltimore City Paper, Baltimore club, DJ Booman, magazines/newspapers, Noise, The Wire