This past Sunday, January 18 marked 10 years since we officially launched.

Things looked a bit different back then. For one thing, Nashville was not yet a twinkle in our eyes. We were based in Bethlehem, PA, where we opened our digital doors to little fanfare as the plucky upstart, Lehigh Valley Underground.

I had just moved back to Bethlehem, my college town, the previous spring. I had worked as Event Staff for ArtsQuest since Musikfest 2014, and secured a PR & Marketing Coordinator job right next door at PBS39 by year’s end. After relocating from New Jersey in May 2015, The Quinn Spinn had gone into hibernation, and our entire fledgling platform faced an uncertain future, amid my and the group’s collective life changes.

I knew that I wanted to keep going, but I felt like the show would function better as part of a greater whole. That’s when I decided to try my hand at starting a music review blog. The first iteration was a short-lived Tumblr blog under The Quinn Spinn banner.

Then, after a night out on the scene in early September, it clicked.

I looked around at my surroundings. Bethlehem — and the Lehigh Valley as a whole — has long had a talent-rich music scene. And, with ArtsQuest playing host to the nation’s largest free, ungated music festival since 1984, it even had more industry infrastructure than most markets its size. There were even a handful of independent media outlets promoting local happenings. It felt like the right time to add a new voice to the region’s music landscape.

The following week, I began brainstorming. It didn’t take me long to come up with the name; we were in the Lehigh Valley, and we’d be giving shine to the original (i.e.; Underground) music scene. I went to work on a logo, and the early sketches involved designing the letters “LVU” entirely out of sewer pipes. You know… because pipes run underground.

Fortunately, I wasn’t a talented enough graphic designer to pull that off, so the idea never gained steam. I needed something simpler and text-based, and it needed to be gritty. So, I opened up Illustrator and, lo and behold, found the perfect typeface — Almaq Rough. From there, I pulled up a stock image of an acoustic guitar, put a sketch filter over it, and we had THIS beaut…

…which I immediately recognized looked terrible and was difficult to read. So, I changed the text to all white against the grey backdrop.

Still not my prettiest work to date, but it would do!

I would spend the next couple months building the backend of the website — yes, this very site that you’re currently visiting! I started contacting artists whom we had featured throughout The Quinn Spinn’s run, offering them the opportunity to be among the first featured on our new blog. I also decided to hold off on our official launch until January. After all, the holidays aren’t typically the best time to launch a new thing, and I was just beginning to process the sudden loss of my mother that September. I had spent much of the fall easing back into everyday life, and wanted to be sure that I didn’t overload myself. Work on the project resumed in November, after the Cubs had been eliminated from the playoffs in quick and hilarious fashion by the Mets in the NLCS. I no longer had a distraction, so it was once again time for an outlet.

Finally, on January 18 — Martin Luther King Jr. Day, because I had the full day off from work — I lifted the veil. We published our first features. Lehigh Valley Underground was live!

Immediately, I started venturing out onto the scene. I started connecting with artists and independent other media outlets. I also began observing the climate of the local ecosystem and one of its landmark events, the Lehigh Valley Music Awards (LVMAs). I worked the 2016 event in my Event Staff role at ArtsQuest, and I came away impressed with the production. However, I was disappointed with the behavior of those who came up short that night, who let their vitriol fly in seemingly every comment section in the region after the show.

So, I did what any complete unknown with a six-week-old music blog would do.

I wrote this.

I took a deep breath before hitting “Publish,” knowing that one of two things would happen: it would establish LVU as an emerging voice in the local music landscape, or it would get us blacklisted from everywhere.

To my delight, it was the former. The LVMAs shared the post and, a few months later, invited us to take part in their official showcase at Musikfest. I started to hear my co-workers and the leadership team at ArtsQuest begin to talk about this new Lehigh Valley Underground thing. The region’s prominent artists began submitting their music and inviting us to cover their gigs. I found myself at more events all over the Valley, I continued improving as a photographer, and all of a sudden, we had a local music movement on our hands.

The rest, as they say, is history — and I’m excited to take a deeper look at that entire history throughout UMC’s 10th Anniversary year.

In the spirit of everyone on the internet talking about 2016, there’s no better time to look back on our roots. They tell the story of where we’ve been, and hold many important keys that we’ll need on the road ahead. 2016 marked a new beginning, and those early days, the lessons learned, and a decade’s worth of twists and turns have led us to the point where we’re still standing, 10 years later, and once again ready to travel the world, as we work to connect independent creatives everywhere.

We hope you enjoy the ride alongside us. 10 years of The Blog, and we’re still just getting started.