Be Rocktacular: Stories from a Music Blogger and Indie Rock Nerd

THE LINER NOTES:

The web has enough music news feeds and MP3 mills. BackstageRider.com is about the passion for the overall experience of music: live gigs, late nights, an album you love so much you want to shag it, musicians you dig and all the crazy fun that goes along with it. It's got brilliant photo galleries, interviews, weird lists, first-hand stories, old music diaries, and a tour bus full of personality.

Mikala Taylor is the BackstageRider and this talk will be about a life in love with music and HOW TO BE ROCKTACULAR.

SIDE A:

• How her music nerdery and relentless passion led her away from freelance into the blog world, and why it quite frankly rocks
• How you should find your voice first, then record your blog around it
• How surrounding yourself with, and being inspired by, creative people - and supporting each other - makes the whole world sing
• How Twitter (or, okay, FB) can save your life and why you should always remember names

SIDE B:

• Dumb stories about bands, cute pictures and favourite musical moments. This talk will be about blogging a passion.

BONUS TRACK!

• If you play it all backwards, you might even find some rockhands! \m/   

ABOUT MIKALA TAYLOR

What’s a Backstage Rider? A rider is the list of things that a band asks a promoter or venue to provide when it plays. So I guess I am the Backstage Writer. Why? I wrote my first record review when I was 12. I met the Cult when I was 14 and interviewed Steve Earle when I was 17. I’ve sat with Green Day in a kebab shop (and The Verve in a coffee shop), asked Oasis why they thought they were such hot shit, had Leonard Cohen tell me I was a beautiful person, been kissed twice on the cheek by John Taylor from Duran Duran and I have had a beer with almost every cool Canadian band popular during the 90s.  Most recently I asked Sebadoh if they needed help getting their shit together – and now I manage their press and PR, went on tour with them for a week and they stayed at my house. I have kept a journal and every single gig ticket of every single show I went to between 1984 and 2000. But I’m not a groupie. Not really.

I write a blog called BackstageRider. It’s about rock/indie/alternative/techno/whatever music and my life in and around it. It's just more than a year old and I'm kind of in love with it. I’m a freelance music writer who is actually obsessed by music. I write about the people who make the music as much as the music itself.By day, I’m a manager of “web content and social media” but I used to write for magazines. I have also been a sex columnist for a London-based dating website. I take a lot of the photos on the site myself, and call Vancouver, Toronto, Copenhagen and London home. I’ve got an actual BA in Journalism and have won some awards. But don’t hold that against me.

I also like meeting new people. Will you be my friend?