Hello, dear readers! My name is Andrew Malphurs and this is my new blog, The Riff Notebook! I just thought it might be a good idea to kick this thing off with a little bit of an introductory post just kind of explaining what exactly this is, who I am, and how this ties into my business, Muse Cabin.
First things first, just to tell y’all a little bit about myself, my name is Andrew, like I already said, and I am a musician local to North Georgia and co-founder of Muse Cabin. I was originally born in Boca Raton, Florida, but I have been a North Georgia resident for over 20 years now, and this is where I plan to stay for the long haul. I am a graduate from the University of North Georgia with a degree in biology which means I am extremely passionate about nature and being in the outdoors. However, music has been my biggest passion for as long as I can remember, and I have been playing music ever since I was six-years-old, starting with a little bit of piano, but then I would pick up guitar a couple years later, and that’s when I really began to take off. As far as my musical preferences go, I listen to all genres of music, and I play and teach within multiple genres as well, but my true love has always been that beautifully loud and obnoxious genre of music we call metal, and that brings me to why it is that I’m even writing this blog in the first place.
Even though I enjoy music of all different styles, metal seems to be that one thing that once you get me talking about it, I could just go on for hours and hours on end, whether that be about my favorite songs from a certain band, where I would rank a band’s discography, or what my opinion is on a new release that has dropped. I am also aware that I am not alone in this, and there are, in fact, lots of metalheads that deeply enjoy these same kind of lengthy conversations that I do. Sadly, being the minority that we are, us metalheads don’t often get a lot of opportunities to have these discussions with a like-minded soul in a given week, that’s what I hope to create with this blog: quality discussion between myself and all my other fellow metalheads from anywhere in the world.
There are three main types of posts I intend to make regularly on this blog. First there will be top 10 lists where I count down my 10 favorite songs by one of my favorite bands plus a handful of honorable mentions. Second, I will also be doing discography rankings for my favorite bands. The main rule here is that I will only be doing these for bands that have 5 or more albums in their discography (because honestly any less than that and there just wouldn’t be enough content for me to make something interesting out of). Finally, I will also be doing an occasion review of an album that really catches my attention or that I’ve really been anticipating. I won’t be doing this for every metal album that comes out because 1) there is soooo much dang music that comes out in a year, there’s no humanly possible way I could keep up with all of it, and 2) I only want to talk about albums that I really genuinely feel as though they deserve the attention.
That’s all I have to say about that! I already have the first official post written for the blog, so I hope you’ll come back next week as well as the weeks to come and check out The Riff Notebook!
