Is this thing still on? After nearly three years of radio silence from me, I wouldn’t blame anyone for assuming this blog was defunct. But so much of the activity for this blog was driven by Sunfest, the West Palm music festival for which I would partner with Empress K of Reggae Reflection to cover, and, for one reason or another, that has either been difficult or impossible in the last couple of years. For one thing, 2017 was the last year for which we had photo passes, which enabled us to take so many great pictures to accompany the concert reviews. In 2018, I tried to go back to my old blogger-in-the-crowd style of covering the festival, but I couldn’t help but miss the press access I had in the years prior. 2019 was another pass-less year, and though there were certain aspects of that year I wanted to cover, it just never happened.
2020 was another story, of course. Like pretty much every large-scale event that pandemic year, Sunfest was cancelled. And since the lockdown of Palm Beach County was in full swing at that point, downtown West Palm was a ghost town, anyway. I remember walking by the Meyer Amphiteatre on what would have been Sunfest weekend, and marvelling at how deserted it was given that the festival normally pulls in 100,000 people over the course of four or five days.
And now here we are in 2021, and even though the end appears to be in sight for the global pandemic that has wreaked so much havoc on every aspect of our lives, Sunfest is once again a no-show. But even as large concerts and music festivals continue their Great Pause, the musicians that would normally be gigging have been working on recording projects, so I actually have a backlog of albums to review. And I even have a book to review (a what?)
So if there’s anybody actually reading this, please bear with me as I bring this blog back from the dead. And in the meantime, I offer you one of my favourite Genesis songs for your listening pleasure:
The Music Type 