The creative remix project was the one that I had been looking forward to the whole semester. Upon reading the prompt, I immediately knew that I wanted to do a podcast for this. I was especially excited because all my friends listen to The Maine and we had always wanted to do something where we could all just sit around and talk about music. This just seemed like it was the perfect opportunity. Unfortunately, falling ill for three weeks prevented me from being able to follow through with my original idea as I didn’t have enough time to get everything together, so I opted to do a blog in place of a podcast. After sending out the prompts that I had initially planned to use for the podcast, I waited for my friends to get back to me with times that worked for us all to get together and chat. Being a huge fan of music, more specifically The Maine, what was the most challenging for me during the process was not going on and on about them because I really can talk about them to no end.

The first half of my project was probably the most time-consuming and on the more difficult side. I went through all seven of their albums that I described in my essay and selected the song that I felt most accurately represented the genre that they fit into during that era of their career.  Each song would be followed by a blurb explaining the elements of the genre that they were adhering to and how the album fit into the bigger picture of what they were doing for the music industry. I found it extremely hard to narrow it down to one song per album because I loved them all and I wish everyone could listen to each song that The Maine writes and just experience and be able to appreciate what they have done for the pop-punk scene.

The second part of my project was the part that had me most excited for this project and that was being able to talk to my friends and fans of the band about what they loved the most about this band. When I spoke to the band about their career and success over the years, all the members agreed that it was “all because of the fans” so it was really nice to be able to talk to the people who really made it all possible and get their take on things. It was an emotional ride, to say the least, but I loved every moment of it. Combing through hours of audio notes and video messages was hard because as people who loved the band and music, it was so easy to get sidetracked and go off on tangents.This project (and the class in general) has allowed me to rediscover my love for music and appreciation for artists and live shows in a way that I didn’t think I could ever again.