This is an ex-blog

I have some bad news and some good news. The bad news is that the time has come to bring down the curtain on this blog. The reason posts have been far less frequent lately hasn't just been because of my newly-minted fatherhood, but also because I've been running out of gas for a while. I've been doing this for over two years now and I think I've said all I can say about old soul records. There are still lots of them out there but I've run out of interesting ways of writing about them. In those 2+ years this blog has been mentioned in USA Today, The Boston Globe, The Guardian (several times) and The Word magazine, and I've averaged around 1700 visits a day which isn't too shabby. When I first started this there were few (if any) mp3 blogs covering vintage soul, now there is Feel It, The Stepfather Of Soul, Awful Thom, Two Minutes of Bliss, Soul Sides and Funky 16 Corners, to serve your listening needs (usually better than me too) – and those are just the ones I know of.

But the good news is I'm not leaving the world of mp3 blogging, another reason for the lack of activity here lately is I've been working on a new blog called "Crying All The Way To The Chip Shop" which is now open for business. It will be very different to this one and I'll probably lose a lot of visitors, but that's OK. One thing I learned doing this is that you shouldn't do what you think will make other people happy. Do your own thing no matter how esoteric it might appear – believe it or not I originally thought not a lot people would be interested in this blog but I did it anyway because no one else was doing it (at least not from an English persective.)

So thanks for all the comments and I hope to see you all at the new digs. I can't think of a classier or more beautiful way to go out than with this tune.

[Download]
Kiss And Say Goodbye - Manhattans