When I first wrote blog posts for Peoria Music Live, I mentioned my issues with anxiety a time or two. I’m not someone who often lets anything deter me from what I want to do, so a lot of work has been done in the last couple of years to get to where I am now in terms of dealing with and overcoming that anxiety. It’s not completely gone though.

Recently a thought occurred to me… Who spends so much time and energy supporting and promoting live musicians without posting interviews with the artists and bands so people can get to know them better?

Me. I’ve been doing that. In my head was a long list of reasons why I haven’t been doing interviews yet. As soon as I started thinking about it, anxiety crept up on me, which made me realize that my excuses for not doing interviews wouldn’t hold water. I was letting anxiety make the choice!

I will admit the problem there is partly because I have attempted to do a few interviews in the past and they didn’t all turn out well. In fact, a couple of them never made it to print… which I still feel terrible about. I definitely don’t want that to happen again.

While we’ve recently started having artists come on What’s Up Peoria every week, there just isn’t an opportunity to get to know anyone well in the couple of minutes we have to talk to them there. I know that the more connected the audience feels with the artists, the more they are going to come out to see them and support them…

So, while I mentioned that previous attempts at interviews didn’t go well, I have worked out a few things that I believe will make this different… plus, I’m determined to make this awesome!

Check out the video for some more details and the photos above for a better view of the room: