Change of Heart? - Progressive Rock Music Forum

You wrote a review 3, 5, 10, 15 years ago. You come across this old review and, to put it lightly, your opinion has changed about this album. Perhaps you see the music very differently now, or perhaps your personal philosophies or worldviews have changed significantly from comments made in the review. Maybe your tastes have just changed.

A. You change nothing. That review and a rating is a snapshot in time. Your opinion today is not necessarily any more enlightened or relevant to other site users than what you felt back then.

B. Change and edit for sure. The review and rating must reflect my feelings of today, not of my past.

C. A rating is easy enough to change, and I'll do that because it helps maintain best accuracy of the collective overall site rating, but I'm not touching the text of the review. Life's too short.

D. None of the above. Instead, I feel....

What's the closest choice to your progressive rock "changes of heart?"

Edited by Finnforest - 18 hours 26 minutes ago at 11:18

...that moment you realize you like "Mob Rules" better than "Heaven and Hell"

I might edit if I see glaring typos, even the probably not, but other than that I would keep it as is, as a product of me then, of what I thought at the time. If I appreciated an album then I doubt I would not at least respect it now anyway. There are some albums that I did not like at first and then later loved and feel I just didn't get or had given enough of chance and a proper listen in the right setting and with the right mindset, but I only like to review music that is significantly meaningful to me.

I would not even want to bother considering changing my old ratings without reviews.

^ Now that sounds like something I could be down for if reviewing were more my thing, which it is not.

progaardvark wrote:

If there was all the time in the world...

I would likely add addendums to my reviews in which I have changed my perspective, while still retaining the original. Like others here, I'm not fond of my first attempts at writing reviews.

This is right. In the practical sense, it comes down to weighing time versus how egregious one feels the old review is. Time spent on rewrites is time not spent doing new work.

Mainly I was curious to see if anyone felt strongly about A v B as a matter of principle.

...that moment you realize you like "Mob Rules" better than "Heaven and Hell"

A. I change nothing. Most of my reviews reflect an opinion I still feel relevant to myself, today. If it doesn't, well, I just let it be, versus nervously worrying about how it would reflect on me now.

Continuity of self may well be illusory. I'd rather be true to my past selves by letting them speak for themselves instead of this current version of me editing what they had to say.

Oh, I just edited two minutes or so ago me. There maybe can be some statute of limitations.

Edited by Logan - 12 hours 10 minutes ago at 17:34

This is all great stuff and very helpful. I've been going through all of my reviews to adjust my formatting because I used to write really long blobs with insufficient paragraph breaks, which is really a drag to read. In the course of splitting those up, I've read some cringe stuff. I started editing some of them and decided it was just not worth it. I need to let it go. So it made me wonder how other reviewers feel about their cringe. Thanks so much for the thoughtful replies.

...that moment you realize you like "Mob Rules" better than "Heaven and Hell"

I cringe when I look at the few reviews I wrote years ago here. I may try it again a bit more carefully. I’m better at 300 word blurbs.

https://bakullama1.bandcamp.com/album/sleepers-2024

I'm often reassessing and changing my reviews--sometimes with addendums, sometimes with total rewrites. I change star ratings all the time (usually upwards).

My earliest reviews here were rather shoddy, free-form, and rather unprofessional (not that I am a professional now, I just have a kind of system now), so I've gone back and re-written or re-formed old reviews. (Not always.)

My original purpose here was just to get to know all the music I never even knew existed until discovering PA (in 2008). Then I decided that I wanted to be a champion and advocate of young talent--thus my blog and radio show titles: "Prog Is Alive and Well in the 21st Century." Then I got excited to "go back" and try to learn the different sub-genres--which led me to having fallen in love with Prog Folk, Canterbury, even some Post Rock and some of the metal groups/categories (especially what I call "atmospheric djent"), and, for the past two years, classic era Jazz-Rock Fusion.

However, I do have a rather cruel habit of only giving time and attention to reviewing albums that I like--albums that I want to "shout from the rooftops" so that the world hears about them and the artists who made them. And I tend to rate higher than most because I use the three star "middle ground" as a standard of proficiency that indicates whether or not I think I could do as well as the product I'm reviewing (I consider myself a pretty creative, imaginative, and hard-working musician, engineer, and audiophile).

Drew Fisher
https://progisaliveandwell.blogspot.com/