Launched in the early-oughts as another player in the Google-query song lyric hit bunch, SONGLYRICS initially thrived by simply displaying lyrics and ads. Eventually, though, the market—and Google—demanded a more creative resource for lyrics, lest your operation get buried in search results, or worse, an empty contribution to the evolution of music culture and analysis.
I joined the team as a writer, advocating for the latter, poached to lead the editorial team followed by a promotion to Creative Director, in which I helmed the entire new vision of the site from a Web 1.0 quick-bounce rate ad-blast to a social journalism tool, stocked with editorial content that rivaled my days at SPIN, Rolling Stone, etc. combined with an entire platform for users and staff to analyze lyrics line-by-line.
Commanding all storytelling operations, pushing out myriad columns, breaking news, interviews, etc., a data entry team, copyright and legal compliances, developers, SEO, social media, light and dark ad pushes, art direction, the creation and implementation of a workable prototype, funneling everything into new viral way to review a song that I created, we shot the traffic from below 30k visitors/day to over 300k/day.
Highlights:
Equal parts moment of solidarity and fundraising effort for victims of the attacks, EoD frontman Josh Homme wrote an open letter to bands to ‘Play It Forward’.
Descending the elevator of one of his many great dicks in the sky, Trump took the podium in his NYC Tower to Neil Young‘s ‘Rockin’ in the Free World‘.
It seems like it was just yesterday that Nadezhda Tolokonnikova was protesting ‘Putin’s Kafka-esque machine‘ from behind the bars of a Moscow prison, refusing to eat.
Eighteen-year-old Michael Schmitt of West Caldwell, New Jersey is facing up to 10 years in prison.
RIFF’d: Father John Misty’s ‘I Love You, Honeybear’
Since falling in love and getting married, framing a narrative arc around that, this is about as close to the real Josh Tillman we’re ever going to see.
The World Reacts to Band Aid 30 Lyric Redux
Since Sir Bob Geldof and Midge Ure gave another star-studded Band Aid reboot to their landmark 1984 anti-poverty charity track, “Do They Know it’s Christmas?
Lyricapsule: R. Kelly’s ‘Trapped in the Closet’; June 6, 2002
The notorious Chicago rapper’s ‘hip-hopera’ debuts.
An open up a discourse on what the hell “folk” means these days.
An Evening (And Morning) With Pearl Jam at Wrigley Field; July 19
‘An Evening (and now morning)’ with the last of a dying arena breed who can still deliver a rock promise.