J Geils Band "Land Of A Thousand Dances"

I always felt like "Land Of A Thousand Dances" was a bit of false advertising.

Really, they only mention about 10 dances. (At least, that's what happens in the J. Geils version, which is the first version of the song I ever owned)

That's a long way from 1000.

Around the time that I was reaching 500 posts on this blog, I decided that my goal would be to reach 1000 posts.  I wasn't sure I had that many songs with stories to match, but it seemed like a good goal.  It seemed like I could get closer to 1000 than the Geils Band did.

So here we are at blog post number 1000.  I made it.  I thought maybe you'd enjoy a few "Every Day I Write The Blog" statistics.

My very first post was on July 1st, 2009 and today's post arrives 1155 days later (so I only skipped 155 days, most of them were in that first year).

An average day has about 50 people clicking on the blog, which isn't much, but nearly 30,000 people have visited at least once over the last 3 years.

Bruce Springsteen wins, for the artist with the most songs written about, with 19.

The Beatles are mentioned in 46 posts, though only 9 posts are specifically about Beatles songs.

I tell stories about my wife in over 40 posts, and mention her in over 100.

There are 9 different girlfriends that I've written about, in 20-plus posts.

Sixteen posts contain the word "Chicken" (which is 13 more times than that word appears in Bob Dylan songs).

I had some great guest posters who wrote about their areas of expertise, including coffee, Cape Cod, record promotion, Father/Son relations, motivation, Bruce Springsteen and celebrity sightings at the hippest ice cream stand in Nashville.

In October 2010, I started doing "Weekend Posts" to include some quick posts about songs that didn't have big stories, but were worth remembering.  I've knocked out 108 of them since.

I wrote far too many eulogies for artists I care deeply about, including remembrances of Vic Chesnutt, Doc Watson, Levon Helm, Clarence Clemons and Alex Chilton.

And wrote some very personal remembrances on the passing of my college roommate, my youngest sister, and even the family fish.

I also wrote more than a couple of posts about my daughter, that she is going to be verrrry embarassed and upset about, when she learns to read.

A handful of songs were written about twice, including "Badlands," "Free Me" and "Angel From Montgomery."

And a few were likely never listened to more than once.

There were posts where no one got the joke or at least received no comment (I posted this on my 41st birthday).  And posts that attracted some truly bizarre comments.

The most viewed post was during Bob Dylan's birthday week, when I wrote about the awful video for "Tight Connection To My Heart."  Someone put a link to my blog on a very popular Bob Dylan web-forum, and to date the page has had something like 1,800 unique visitors, making it twice as popular as the 2nd most viewed post.

As far as I can tell, the least read post is this Weekend Post about Sebadoh, which, according to Google Analytics, has only had one person look at it, for a total of :23 seconds, since the day after it was originally posted.

So there you have it.  Thanks for reading.  Whether you've just checked in once or twice, or you follow along regularly.

I still have a handful of stories I'd like to tell, so I'll keep going for awhile.  But don't expect a Pretenders-related post titled "2000 Miles" . . . 


Hear the song on Youtube.