thanks for choosing hissing lawns as the best blog in Savannah

On Tuesday evening, May 19, Larry Jack and I will be at Connect Savannah’s big party at the Morris Center to accept the award for Best Local Blog in the alt-weekly’s massive Best of Savannah 2015 readers’ poll. (UPDATE: Click here for Connect’s blurb about us. And, um, wow, we also scored a runner-up — Connect Savannah — for Best Local Website.)

A sincere thanks to all of you who voted for hissing lawns. And thanks also to those of you didn’t vote for us but are regular readers, have liked and shared posts, have contributed ideas, and have followed us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. And thanks, of course, to all the people who make up Savannah’s music community.

Thanks to Connect, too, for the herculean effort of assembling the Best of Savannah issue.

I’d also like to personally thank our writers and photographers — the active, the inactive, the completely unpredictable, and the “retired” (including Connect’s A&E editor Anna Chandler). I founded this site in September 2013 after years of telling people that we needed a collaborative music blog in Savannah, and I had no idea at the time just how much talent we would attract. No one is making any money here, though I wish we were; our contributors are simply passionate about music and about the people who make up the Savannah scene.

We read a lot of music blogs and websites, and we honestly think we stack up pretty well.

That said, there is a lot that we could be doing better. We’ve done a pretty good job covering high-profile touring acts that come through town, and the blog has tracked some genres fairly closely — Americana, punk, metal, garage rock, various other stripes of indie music.

But we’ve done a poor job covering rap, hip-hop, country, jam, jazz, some hard rock. We’re hit or miss on singer-songwriters — mostly miss. Larry Jack’s weekly previews mention all sorts of venues around town, but a disproportionate number of our reviews and photo galleries are from The Jinx and Hang Fire. Those two venues certainly deserve that attention, but other venues deserve more than they’re getting.

We need additional contributors to help fill these holes. If you’re interested in becoming a hissing lawns contributor, even if your main interests are in genres we’re already covering heavily, please message me via the hissing lawns Facebook page. I’d like to see more previews, more reviews, more photo galleries, more interviews, more video — more everything.

I also hope that we’ll be covering additional festivals, shows, and news from across the Southeast and around the country, but we’ll continue to spend most of our time and energy right here at home. (Btw, we can’t cover Savannah’s active house show scene. If we did, the regular venues could get shut down.)

In a sense, hissing lawns splintered away from the other site I edit, Savannah Unplugged, which was runner-up for Best Local Blog in 2014. Now that I’m putting so much time into hissing lawns, I’m considering ways to retool and reboot that original blog.

A final comment: hissing lawns is named in honor of Joni Mitchell’s song and album “The Hissing of Summer Lawns” — an allusion that is lost on the vast majority of readers, I’ve learned. Here’s a snippet of the lyrics:

He put up a barbed wire fence
To keep out the unknown
And on every metal thorn
Just a little blood of his own
She patrols that fence of his
To a latin drum
And the hissing of summer lawns

If you’ve grown up anywhere in the South or Midwest, you’ve heard the hissing of summer lawns. You’ve seen attempts to define and structure the natural world with geometric precision. And you’ve heard the untamed wildness that can be kept briefly at bay, but cannot be denied.

I think it’s a great name for a music blog, even if people occasionally call it “hissing loans” or “kissing yawns”.

Thanks for reading hissing lawns.