Well before we break the suspense and reveal the most liked and listened to piece of this concluded summer, let me say just a bit about overall listenership and readership. Both are up to historic heights this summer. When this project officially launched a bit over four years ago listens of the audio pieces (which are also available as podcasts, even though our typical sub-5 minute “just the musical piece” format is not the norm for that talkative format) were listened to at a rate substantially greater than the page view stats for the blog posts. This may indicate that podcast listeners are more prone to sample new and little-known podcasts than blog readers, how older blogs with more posts and links get ranked in search engines, or it could say something about how folks like you may have changed how you consume content. Go figure. Then in the middle of last year, Spotify unilaterally stopped distributing the Parlando podcast audio, which apparently was because they decided that our format is unsuitable for their purposes. Not a big thing, as they were never more than 15% or so of our audio listens, and if you would like to hear Parlando Project audio in a podcast reader, most other podcast services, including Apple’s still carry our audio—but around the same time blog page views started to take off, and this spring and summer were the best yet. Then in August something odd started happening with listens to the audio pieces. I’m not sure what it is, or if it represents “real” listeners or something else, but unique listens to the audio in both August and September nearly tripled the average month earlier in the year, and September still has a week left!

More people reading this blog, more people listening to the audio pieces. Thanks!

One thing that gratifies me when I look at the stats is that there are people listening to the old audio pieces all the time, and a great deal of the blog readership seems to come from folks finding a particular post, often one that is several years old, from a web search. It’s not uncommon that the most visited post in a day or week’s report is an older one. If literature was the news that stays news, the web hasn’t changed that. Another thing that gratifies me is all the listeners and readers from outside the U.S., which is one reason why I spend less time on current American politics than many other blogs do.

But those listens bring me to an issue in determining what is the most liked and listened to piece this past summer.

I said it was complicated. A number of older pieces got significant listenership this summer: Jean Toomer’s superb love poem “Her Lips are Copper Wire,”  William Blake’s parable “A Poison Tree,”  and Carl Sandburg’s summer neighborhood hymn “Back Yard.”  “Back Yard”  was nearly a repeat visitor this summer’s Top Ten by the audio listening stats. But then I noticed ¾ of it’s summer listens were from Washington state—a fine part of our country, but how had Sandburg or my performance spiked in interest there? Odd that. 90% of “A Poison Tree” listeners this summer were from Great Britain. OK, Blake is more revered in his home country. But there was an even more runaway oddity in the Summer 2020 listenership: Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “Pied Beauty,” an audio piece from last fall, got nearly twice the listens as most of the pieces you’ve seen so far in our Top Ten. I’d be calling it our most popular—and then I noticed: all but two of it’s listens were from Malaysia. The listens didn’t come in one big bunch, they were spread out almost equally between June, July, and August.

It looked like someone caring enough to game the system. Now I like Hopkins and what I did with his poem, and if this just happened out of genuine love for the poem or my performance, I thank that possible someone for their enthusiasm. As the listens for “Inversnaid”  this summer show, whoever that was isn’t alone in liking to hear Hopkins done the Parlando way.

So, decisions of the judges are final, and there will be another poem that will be named tomorrow as the most liked and listened to piece this past summer.

But here are player gadgets for those “golden oldies” to listen to why you wait.

“Her Lips are Copper Wire”

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“A Poison Tree”

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“Back Yard”

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And yes, “Pied Beauty”

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Thanks for reading and listening. While this is a time consuming and non-revenue project, I try to make it worth your attention. So, to see that these encounters with various words and various music have been worth that to you is what keeps it going.