Hi! I’m Branden Palomo…
You may know me from the Better Band Podcast, or my guest appearances on podcasts such as Live on 4 Legs, The State Of Love And Trust, and Deprogrammed.
Podcasting is a very time consuming hobby, especially when you hold yourself to impossibly high standards (maybe not content wise, but that’s up to the listener to decide). For me, that means trying to find guests to talk about songs (which only gets harder once the Good songs are taken), cutting out background noise as much as I can (especially during football season when the in-laws are watching their Sunday Ticket), adjusting silence from recording lag, and editing in clips from songs and concerts. All of that is what I would want in a track-by-track Pearl Jam podcast if I were a listener, so that’s why my podcast had to have it.
I say “made” in the past tense, because I just can no longer scrounge up the time to put this podcast out on a consistent schedule.
I went from every week to every two weeks, and that is pretty much the threshold that I feel is fair to have people wait for a podcast episode. I don’t think that taking a break so I can get back in the groove would fix things in the long term. But who knows, maybe this will just be one long protracted hiatus and I’ll come back in little spurts here and there? But I can’t in good conscience say I’m putting this on pause and then leave everyone with bated breath, waiting for when I come back home from going out to buy some cigarettes.
However, what I do feel confident in being able to provide, content-wise, are posts here on Substack.
I am much more confident and comfortable with the written word, and I don’t have to be right in front of my desktop to do it. You lose the immediacy of my buttery baritone, but I intend to keep these to a manageable length, and not as much of an undertaking as a 30-minute-plus podcast episode. Plus, this has gotta be better for my mental health to do on my lunch breaks at work than scrolling through social media.
And on the theme of social media (nailing it with the segues!), the “BetterBandPod” accounts in Twitter and Instagram are going to be going away, as well. I’m only holding onto my personal Twitter for DM’s, and Insta for posting pics of the records I pick up (#VivaLaVinyl). I’m on both Spoutible and Post.News right now, to see which one ends up as the VHS to the other’s Betamax. Mastodon is too complicated for the masses to get onboard with, so it probably won’t break out into the mainstream and be THE Twitter replacement. I’m sure there are some dorks that will prefer it,though, just like Laserdisc…
The Better Band episodes and feed will also be sunset, but everything will be kept here (‘cause it’s free). You’ll be able to update your podcast apps to this feed if you want to be able to revisit classic episodes in the way you’ve become accustomed to, or have instant access to any aural surprises I have for you. I mean, I still have all this equipment, and I don’t want it to go to a complete waste…
Thanks so much to everyone that’s been listening! I can’t help but feel like I’m disappointing you, but hopefully if you choose to subject yourself to my blathering here, you’ll find yourself a little entertained. And who knows, we may learn something along the way.
-bcp
P.S. Hey, why not end with a song?