On one hand:
“If you fail to plan, plan to fail”
on the other:
“If you don’t care where you’re going, it doesn’t matter what road you take.”
Upon reflection, it became very clear to me that I like practicing and performing music more than recording and blogging about the process. So, instead of doing weekly updates like last time, I just learned and performed a new set:
These are all songs from 2020-2025 that I picked out of a massive playlist of “hits” so I could get a better sense of what modern popular music is like. I’ll post the setlist timestamps and charts at the end of this post (they’re also in the video description). When I say jpop here I actually mean anisong, but I didn’t want to go through that whole explanation lol.
This performance isn’t as clean, but I had a much more enjoyable and stress-free experience. I’m sure the right way to grow the audience would be to break each song into its own video and drip feed them to the algorithms, but ugh. Editing and uploading and spamming feeds is not my idea of fun. For now, fun matters more.
I also realized that I’ve put off telling my full story a little too long. I’ve added it to the About Me section on the About page, and will hopefully summarize it for the next video for the channel.
In the time that I’ve just been chilling and doing my own thing, I’ve started to form a new idea of the direction to take this project, so I’ve started to write the plan out for that. Please look forward to it.
I’ve also been making steady progress with the voice lessons and playing jazz. That’s been a lot of fun, but it also takes up a lot of brain power. Hopefully next up is a proper jazz set. These songs are taking a lot more effort to learn though.
Oh, I also acquired a new Fanner electric ukulele, which I posted a bit about on the channel and did a mini blog of the experience over on the Ukulele Underground forums. I really like it, though I think I still prefer the Sparrow overall.
Speaking of UU, I have been participating in their weekly song challenges which I mostly post as unlisted videos, though they all can be viewed on this public playlist of challenge songs.
So, that’s the update for now. I’m hoping soon I’ll have my plan together and can start working toward that bigger goal again. And I hope you’ll join me on this journey as well.
Charts for the Modern Pop set songs: https://www.ultimate-guitar.com/playl…
Timestamps
0:00 Intro
1:03 Too Sweet by Hozier
4:26 Blinding Lights by The Weeknd
7:40 Espresso by Sabrina Carpenter
11:09 Play with Fire by Nico Santos
14:10 Birds of a Feather by Billie Eilish
18:08 Lose Control by Teddy Swims
22:33 A bar song (Tipsy) by Shaboozey
25:36 I like the way you kiss me by Artemas
28:13 Austin by Dasha
30:46 August by Taylor Swift
34:27 Die With a Smile by Bruno Mars (feat Lady Gaga)
38:19 Stick Season by Noah Kahan
41:31 I Had Some Help by Post Malone
44:20 Mood by 24KGoldn
47:05 Heat Waves by Glass Animals
50:42 Good Luck Babe by Chappell Roan
54:31 Ghost in the Machine by SZA