Music
We love music — in another life, maybe it would have been core to our careers…but maybe that would have spoiled it for us too.
So, whereas neither of us plays music publicly anymore, following the independent music scene as it continues to grow and evolve and seeing bands we love live are both key to our extracurricular lives.
We used to interview bands and review records on our regular blog back when people actually sent out demos in the mail (here’s the archive if you have any interest). From doing that, we ended up on quite a few PR lists that have just expanded over the years as people move on to new ventures with their contacts lists. We don’t interview or review any more, but we do listen to everything that’s sent our way still in an effort to actively stay on top of new music.
Much of what catches our ear ends up on our ongoing mixtape series and, eventually, our yearly best of mixes.
Our best-ofs put together tracks from our top ten favorite albums of the year (in order of release) along with an illustration we create bringing together the corresponding ten album covers. Then we round out the mixtape with tracks from our next top ten (again, in order of release) to give you a 20-track playlist repping our favorite LPs of the year.
The mixtape for 2024 features longtime favorites like Glass Animals (who also gave us our favroite live show of the year), Vampire Weekend (second), and Efterklang as well as new-to-us artists like Fred again., Lizzy McAlpine, and Dua Selah (of Sex Education fame). Listen below.
We’re also putting a link to another favorite best of from years past — just click the image to be brought to the 2021 journal entry.
We’ll embed new playlists as we begin to build them this year, and you can always find past ones on our Apple Music & Spotify profiles.
Food
Another passion of ours — food. We both went vegan in the 90s for ethical reasons. The world may be on fire right now, but it’s certainly come a long way in terms of both the quality of vegan food and the level to which vegan food and the discussion of ethics have enetred the mainstream.
Being vegan for so long (and so long ago) meant a lot of experimentation with vegan home cooking, much of which we would share in the form of recipes posted to our old web journal.
We’re not reviving said journal — which you can find all 15 years and 1300+ posts of here — but we thought it’d be nice to pull a few of the recipes or posts and feature them here, maybe with some new ones every now and then.
We also run a food-centric Instagram account in addition to our primary account, where we “break for lunch” — @lunchwithravenandcrow if you feel like following along.
And if you’re familiar with old journal and have any requests, just let us know.
