Spotlighting great music coverage

By Rick Morris

Our recent content upgrades here on The FDH Lounge have allowed us to put far more bells and whistles in front our you, our loyal readers. One such addition was our index of subject matter that we have published since our August 2007 launch -- it can be seen in the left-hand column, towards the top (presently the fifth element down, just below links to all archived material).

We have kept that index private for several months now as we have tried to get a grip on everything that we have done for purposes of marketing. If you have the kind of variety that we do, you've got to leverage it properly. We decided to put the index up here on the site so that we could show exactly what we meant by our phrase "nothing is off-topic."

Being perfectionists, there were aspects of what we found that disappointed us, but have spurred us on to become even more well-rounded. We thought that we'd had a bit more NCAA hoops coverage than we actually did, so we're being mindful of that going forward -- starting with our general preview of conference play that we published at the start of January. We were also a bit dismayed to find that our music and movie content had not been as deep as we had thought. Certainly, our Entertainment Editor Samantha Jones has plenty of good material that we want to showcase here (as proven by her recent victory in our "fantasy supergroup" rock band draft) and the same can be said of her husband, FDH Senior Editor (and de facto assistant entertainment editor) Jason Jones.

But fortunately, we exist under the premise that we get credit from you the reader not merely for our original content, but also for pointing you to great material in other places. As such, we embed a lot of videos here, we have established content-syndication agreements with other growing New Media enterprises and we link to great content on a number of different subjects (with our geopolitics links perhaps being the most thought-provoking and educational of the ones that we find).

One such means of expanding our entertainment coverage is to take that last approach and apply it to that industry. Doing so is made much easier when you happen to cross paths with awesome and creative people as we so often do here at FDH and this past week exemplified that point to a "T."

Jeff Wilson is a really talented Cincinnati-based writer who is interested in different areas of entertainment, but may be most noteworthy for being the type of person who has forgotten more about music than the rest of us ever knew in the first place. He and I both work for a multinational company that was having a regional conference in the 'Nati this past week and it was a pleasure to catch up with him and exchange perspectives on what we are both doing right now. During the last such occasion we had to do this, FDH was still primarily a fantasy sports-based company and had not yet expanded into other areas, so much had changed on my end.

Likewise, Jeff's path has evolved as well. His work can now be found, among other places, at the online rock magazine Crawdaddy, a new addition to the entertainment area of our FDH Lounge Ultimate Links page (which is now up to 1,316 links in all, but who's counting?). We'll certainly be looking at Crawdaddy to find any interesting work worth calling to your attention -- but specifically, going forward, we're going to be following Jeff's work there and linking to it because of his very interesting perspectives, which I believe fit in perfectly with our whole FDH Lounge attitude. If you'd like examples of that assertion, I'm happy to provide them.

^ This examination top-to-bottom examination of The White Album is very informative and entertaining. If you believe the notion that music fans can be broken into the "Beatles guy" or "Stones guy" in terms of their overall tastes, I was always much more the "Stones guy," but I feel that I can relate to Beatles fans better after reading this column.

^ In our celebrity culture, we often tend to forget that the most interesting characters generally aren't household names. Jeff nails that point in this piece about former Band musician Rick Danko. The joy that music can bring, the sadness of tunes left uncreated by a life cut short ... there are different elements in this column that perfectly represent the man's music and that of the unit for whom he previously played. On a side note, that late '70s concert where Jeff first saw Danko sounds like something I really would have liked to have seen, as a big fan of good old unreconstructed Southern rock.

We'll continue to point you to Jeff's work as a part of our rededication to expanding the variety of our content in The FDH Lounge, because we enjoy being a place where you can find and be directed to entertaining and enlightening material on a wide array of subjects.