Big thanks to all those who’ve donated thus far. I posted the initial offer with a lot of hesitation (asking for help is the worst) and was immediately met with a surprising amount of kindness, including some very thoughtful emails. Activity has tapered off since the first couple days, but there’s still time for any procrastinators like myself to get in on the action.

All the details of donating can be found in the post from last week.

That doesn’t mean you have to see them, though.

Through the end of next week, you can ‘Turn Off the Ads’ by becoming an official Country California supporter with a one-time donation of at least $25. If you were to figure that as the cost of a yearly subscription (which it’s not), it would be just over $2 per month. So, if you get at least $2 worth of enjoyment or information out of the site on a monthly basis, we’d appreciate your consideration.

How will it work?

After I’ve received your donation via PayPal, I’ll create a unique username and password for you. As long as you remain logged into your account, you won’t see any ads other than those in the actual content of a post (e.g. Amazon links). All that slow-loading Google junk will be gone.

Any other perks?

Besides not having to see existing ads, you’ll also be immune to any future changes in advertising. If we decide to try new ads in different places around the site or fill up every available blank space with “shoot the monkey” ads, you won’t be bothered by those changes.

Your generosity will be recognized on a special Donors page, unless you’d prefer to remain anonymous.

There’s also the possibility of donor-only content as time goes on.

How long will I remain ad-free?

The intention is to continue the ad-free version for the life of the site. No further donations will be required.

Why now?

Here’s how small-time I am: As I’ve bounced around over the past three years, the permanent address I’ve used to receive mailings from artists and publicists is my Mom’s home address.

Well, times are tough everywhere. Drained financially and emotionally by persistent medical problems, Mom’s in danger of losing the house. If she’s forced to let it go at her current age, she’ll never own again. I’m not well-off enough to help her on my own, so this is my attempt to leverage whatever bit of a following I’ve gained here to help her turn the corner, while hopefully offering readers something of value.

If you’re able to contribute beyond $25, that’s obviously appreciated. If you can’t spare $25 but would like to contribute anyway, donations of any amount will be recognized on the Donors page.

Thanks for your readership and support. Back to making fun of Scotty McCreery soon.

Over the last 4.5 years, The 9513 had come to define the online country music space. Its reviews, interviews, and articles set the standard for intelligent discourse. Its news roundups, continued so faithfully for so long by Brody, created community where there had been only a mess of different country sites cranking out content in isolation. The comment section was always alive with discussion and debate, to an extent that sometimes became exhausting toward the end.

Speaking personally, my own involvement with The 9513 over the last 2.5 years has been one of the most thrilling experiences of my young life and career. When they asked me to become a contributor, I was amazed that they would have me. Despite feeling somewhat like the second cast of “Saved by the Bell” or like that nephew they brought in to replace Ron Howard toward the end of “Happy Days” — the writers to that point (Matt C., Jim Malec, and the Verchers themselves) had set such a high bar — I seriously considered shuttering this blog on the spot. After all, I was writing at The 9513. I could hardly believe it.

It didn’t help my inferiority complex much as they added great writers like Juli Thanki, Karlie Justus, Blake Boldt, Sam Gazdziak, Stephen Deusner, Ken Morton Jr., and all the rest, but I did my best to keep up and contribute where I could. When I expressed interest in trying my hand as an interviewer, they hooked me up not just with a phone appointment with Jesse Dayton, but also with the recorder I’d need to capture the conversation. The Verchers were, and are, a class act.

Country California survived, but mostly — to my own way of thinking, anyway — as a supplement rather than a ‘real’ blog in itself. What’s the difference? You could read only The 9513 and know almost everything you needed to know about what was going on in country music. Conversely, if Country California was the only blog you were reading, you were getting a (deliberately) skewed sense of current events. I’ve always assumed the reader’s familiarity with discussions happening elsewhere.

Which is why, with the closing of The 9513, there’s a gaping hole at the center of the online country music universe. Those “discussions elsewhere” are happening less and less, and without news roundups, there’s nobody tying them all together. I don’t think any single site will ever fill the void left by The 9513, but those of us remaining can do our best to move inward a bit and take on some of the varied roles it played.

As for me, I’m in no great hurry to pursue a regular gig anywhere else. What made writing for The 9513 so worthwhile was that it was actually and legitimately a site I loved, whether I was contributing to it or not. At present, there aren’t any other sites I feel that same way about.

That leaves Country California as my main focus again, which could be kind of nice. I’ll do my best to keep you up-to-date on all the good music that’s coming out. (In fact, I’ve got a behemoth of a “Prime Cuts: April” in progress as we speak.) I’ll link out more to show you where some of the best online coverage and discussion of country music is happening. We’ll keep the Quotable Country and Fake News rolling (with special thanks to Trailer for all his work on the latter this past month).

The 9513 might be over, but country music blogging isn’t. Let’s all do our best to carry the legacy forward.

• I recently added an Album Release Calendar, which I’ll do my best to keep up-to-date with any country-ish albums on the horizon. We’ve got new stuff from Willie Nelson, Diana Jones, Jason Isbell, Ralph Stanley and Emmylou Harris coming up in the near future, just to name a few.
• For those of you residing in or coming through the Northern California area, I recently added a bunch of dates to the local Concert Calendar. There are about 14 in April alone, including Terri Clark, Chris Young, The Devil Makes Three, Mindy Smith, etc. I’ve got listings all the way through October.
• In an effort to make the site more accessible to first-time readers—I can only imagine it’d be weird to arrive on a site like this if you’d only ever been to CMT or whatnot—I’m trying to put together a Best Of Country California section to showcase some of the most immediately likable stuff we’ve done to date (i.e. stuff that’s actually thought-provoking or funny and doesn’t rely too heavily on inside jokes). If you have suggestions as far as older posts to include, I’d love to hear them.

The album and concert calendars can both be found under the ‘Resources’ tab at the top of every page. The Best Of section will be linked from the homepage once I put it together.

As some of you might recall (although I’d be concerned if you did…), the design we’ve had since March 2009 happened quite by accident: I was fooling around with some code I shouldn’t have been fooling around with late at night and finally reached a point where it was easier to start fresh with a new design than to set the old one right again. Total amateur mistake.

Two years later, the new new look of Country California debuts under much happier circumstances. In fact, this one was downright premeditated. Here’s a quick catalog of the major changes:

• For first-time/occasional visitors, the magazine-style front page hopefully puts some of our better content right up front and allows folks to get oriented quickly.
• Regular readers can switch their bookmarks over to the new Blog page, which puts all the posts in reverse chronological order with the newest up top and most of my awkward phases buried way, way at the back. This is something I always wanted to implement in the old design, but the coding involved was over my head. Now we’ve got it.
• There’s about the same amount of advertising, but it’s displayed more prominently. Sorry… necessary evil. Come to find out that ads don’t work great when you hide them away unobtrusively. I think we’re still striking a pretty decent balance of classiness and, you know, possibly becoming financially solvent.
• Comment preview is (temporarily?) disabled.
• Down by the blogroll, there’s an auto-updated list of my last few posts at The 9513.

Same old content in a brand new frame? Well, for the time being. But this new frame will allow for new kinds of content and new kinds of engagement over time. And, speaking as the guy who looks at this thing more than anyone, a new design forces a new perspective on what I’m doing here. For me, that’s exciting.

I’ll still be settling in and tweaking a few things for the next couple days, but do take a look around and let me know what you think of our new home, including any problems or oddities that might arise. I hope you like it. Or that, if you initially hate it, you eventually come to like it.

As much as we might tend to skew toward the traditionalish when taken collectively, there were 39 different albums included among our individual Top 10s. That’s some pretty good breadth of coverage, I think.

A little bird told me the Country Universe list is going up soon, too, so keep an eye out for that. My guess is their list will look about half like ours, with the other half rightly showing Chely Wright and Peter Cooper some love. But what do I know?

As much as I like to see Fake News doing well, I also have grand ambitions of placing more editorials and ‘serious’ content in the Top 10, so I’ll be working on more stuff along those lines, too.

More of everything.

That’s the game plan for the new year.

But first, here are our 10 Most Popular Posts of 2010.

1. Carrie Underwood Not Pregnant Yet

2. Tim McGraw Self-Releasing New Album on CD-R

3. John Rich’s House Even Cooler Than You Thought

4. More ACM Awards Predictions

5. Sexy Music Video Released by Forgettable Female

6. ACM Awards 2010: Predictions

7. The 20 Best Country Live Albums of All Time, Part II

8. Best Country Albums of 2010: Progress Report

9. Jason Aldean Stabbed in Biker Bar Brawl

10. Alan Jackson Seeks Embarrassing Dud for Next Album

Obviously, content is more important than numbers, but growth is growth. If we can top ourselves in a month like November, I’m very optimistic about what we’ll be able to do when our attention is less divided.

Two-and-a-half years in, I’m still excited to see what’ll happen next. And that’s thanks to you.

So, thank you. Keep reading and we’ll keep writing, capiche?

Any jerk can start a blog, but it takes a particular kind of jerk to keep one going for two years. I recently became that kind of jerk. Country California began in late April of 2008, and here we are in late April of 2010.

Over the last two years, I’ve become less precious about this blogging thing – less concerned with how I might be perceived, more willing to simply be myself and suffer the consequences. If I lose interest in a particular feature, I’ll stop doing it until interest returns. If I come up with some nutty new idea that could end up being really stupid, I’ll take the chance and see what happens. (Fake News was once just such an idea.) I don’t want this to become a grind, so I’ll ease up the pace, or even put the blog on temporary hiatus, if that’s what needs to happen… because ultimately me staying interested is the best possible thing for the site, and the only thing that will allow it to continue. These are the things I’m thinking about, two years in.

My Gift to Me

Over the next couple weeks, I’m going to free myself of some blogger guilt by banging out some album reviews that have been weighing on my mind over the past months. If the balance of content tips more toward album reviews over that period, now you know why. Rest assured that I’ll be back to my old tricks in no time.

Donating and Advertising

I appreciate anything and everything people do to support the site – reading, commenting, linking, emailing, interacting with us on social networks, whatever. Just keep doing what you’re doing and we’ll be set. But, since I haven’t mentioned it on the blog before, there is a page for those interested in sending a couple bucks as a donation or wanting to advertise on the site. You can find that here.

Fake Jamey / Succinct Album Review Challenge (Giveaway)

Update (5/4/10): The response to this challenge has been… nothing… so I’m going to call it off and put the $10 toward Nashville flood relief, okay?

To celebrate two years, let’s do a giveaway challenge. It’s a giveaway challenge because entering is slightly more involved than usual. Here are your options:

• Do a Succinct Album Review of any album, new or old. All you need is a Post It, a pen, a CD, and something to take the picture with (like a camera). Make it pithy, humorous, nonsensical, whatever.
• Make your own Fake Jamey Johnson and take a picture of him doing something.
• For you overachievers, do a Succinct Album Review featuring your own Fake Jamey Johnson (like so). This option will count as two entries in the random drawing.

Whichever option you choose, email your picture to me at cmw@countrycalifornia.com (subject line should be something about a giveaway) and you’ll be in to win.

Once the entries are in, I’ll post all the submissions and put the winner to an anonymous vote. The picture with the most votes will get a $10 Amazon gift card, redeemable for any music your heart desires. Another randomly-chosen submission (remember, the third option gets two entries here) will win a mystery CD of my choosing. Everyone else will win the satisfaction of having participated.

If this giveaway proves as unpopular as I suspect it might, the first entry could be the de facto winner! Get your pictures in by May 8 to be considered.

And Finally…

Thanks for the last two years! It would’ve sucked without you.

1. Words that showed up a lot in descriptions of the site:

• funny
• informative
• sarcastic/snarky/dry
• unique/unusual/quirky/insane/original/clever

2. Quotable Country is the site’s most popular feature, followed closely by Fake News. No surprises here.

3. Fake News also ranks as some people’s least favorite feature, a good reminder not to overdo it.

4. Fake News should appear ~2 times per week. The number that wants it no more than once per week is equal to the number that wants it all the time, so the middle ground (2 or 3, with most preferring 2) seems to be the sweet spot.

5. Most people think the amount of ‘serious’ music coverage (reviews, editorials, etc.) should stay about the same, but if the balance is going to tip in either direction, it should be upwards. Only one respondent specifically requested less of the serious stuff.

6. Readers are slightly more interested in discovering new artists than reading about old favorites. Me too!

7. Suggested artists we need to write more about skew traditional, but the only name mentioned more than once was Bucky Covington. I’ll get right on that.

8. A multi-part question, which revealed:

• Most respondents have bought music on our recommendation, and would have bought even more if they weren’t so poor.
• Most people get quite a few laughs out of Fake News. Only one person has never laughed at any Fake News. That person? Scowling Randy Owen.
• Most people have shared an article with a friend or mentioned something from the site in conversation multiple times over the past year.
• Even though most people have disagreed vehemently with the site on more than one occasion, only 2 people have wanted to punch me in the face more than 10 times in the past year. The majority of respondents (75%) have never wanted to punch me in the face at all. And I’m betting the 75% could beat up those two people.
• Jokes about Bucky Covington’s mustache offend virtually nobody, save for a few quacks who claim to have been offended by them more than 10 times… even though I haven’t made ten Covington mustache jokes in the eligibility period. Can you be offended by the same joke twice?
• Seven of you have inherited millions from an old guy you met in a bar at least ten times in the past year. I guess that Currington song wasn’t so farfetched after all.

9. Throwaway question, mostly an opportunity to offer “a little verklempt” as an answer choice.

10. Open-ended. I got some very thoughtful, constructive responses here – including some detailed critiques, for which I’m especially grateful – so would like to thank all who took the extra time to fill this one out. I’ve pored over all of your comments and they’ve certainly given me a lot to think about as we enter 2010.