Exactly 10 years ago to the day, Is This The Life? was launched. It started off with a clear direction - to document all the significant events in my life and relate them to the music I was listening to and discovering at the time. I achieved that. I also worked in lots of articles about gigs, songs and albums that I wanted to say something about, and showed my love for a number of significant artists who have contributed in some way to all the pleasure and pain I've experienced over the past 52-and-a-bit years.
In recent times though, it's all become a bit of a chore. Partly, it's because there is no clear direction anymore, everything has become a bit random and sporadic. It's also partly down to me not feeling I have much more to say. This could very easily become a blog dedicated to R.E.M. and going by the stats for past R.E.M. posts I've done, I'd probably get more readers and feedback if I decided to do that. Give the people what they want, right? But to be honest, that doesn't interest me. While I love R.E.M. with a passion (and I've certainly talked about the passion a fair bit...), I love new music, new bands, new thrills too. I still go to gigs as often as I can (though hasn't that become so much more expensive post-Covid?), and I'm buying more new vinyl than I have done in more than 30 years (ditto). But recent attempts to write about this have been difficult. To be honest, I've been finding it really hard to sit and write about anything for quite a while.
And so, after much consideration, I mark the 10th anniversary of my first post with this - the last post to appear on Is This The Life?. This river has finally reached its sea.
Don't cry. It's really not worth it.
I've decided to retire the blog for good and instead offer occasional contributions to other blogs as and when I feel inspired to do so. The only things I'll update are my gig list (purely for my own record) and the links to articles I write for others.
So, the final act - some music. Here are the first three goodbye songs that sprung to mind. They're all 90s indie songs which is a bit of a narrow field, but I can't even be bothered to think about it further. To be fair though, they're good songs.
Here's the song that gives this post its title (and includes the lyric at the top of the page):
And finally... in my very first post, I quoted Lou Reed and linked to a Velvet Underground track. So my very last post will conclude with another Velvet Underground song, only covered by probably the most influential band of my life, and one I have written countless things about both here and on other sites. So here are some closing credits. Quite literally. This is the very end of the groundbreaking concert movie Tourfilm, documenting R.E.M.'s massive Green Tour thoughout 1989. It broke a lot of moulds with regards how concert films "should" be made. I've broken no moulds whatsoever in terms of how blogs should be written, but it has been (mostly) fun. Hwyl fawr fy nghyfeillion, a diolch.
