Today is a very proud date that has been notched into the young Addicted to Vinyl timeline. The great Mel from Life, Liberty, & Pursuit of Your Boyfriend has given me an award as one of her seven favorite bloggers.

There are a couple of connecting factors tied in with the award, one of which is that we are all from Cleveland. I’m proud to be one of the “Cleveland boys,” and will return the favor with a rundown of the favorite blogs on my ever-growing reading list that is kept somewhat organized by my much loved Google Reader.

We’ll call this the 1st annual Vinyl Awards.

I’d come up with a more clever name, but honestly I’m too bummed that I got rid of my entire 8-Track collection when I moved back from the east side. I’m thinking that those would have been really cool trophies.

So instead, here are my simple kudos.

We’ll come up with something cooler for next year’s awards ceremony.

Note: the hideous graphic above is being passed around with each set of awards. I’m guessing this award thing musta started in Portugal.

It also came with the following notes:

With this award comes with a little workout:

1. Put the logo on your blog.
2. Add a link to the person who awarded it to you.
3. Nominate at least 7 other blogs.
4. Add links to these blogs on your blog.
5. Leave a message for your nominee on their blog.

Here are my honorees (kind of/sort of in chronological order as I discovered them…):

1. TDavid from Make You Go Hmm. I’ve been reading TDavid’s blog for many years now, and we’ve had many discussions about subjects ranging from technology geek related topics, to Rick Springfield. I think that I first came across TDavid, because we were both involved with Blogcritics.

Speaking of that…

2. Eric from Blogcritics.org. I was aware of Eric (a fellow Clevelander,) because of Eric’s 107.9 The End related adventures, and his book that he wrote about how to network in the music industry.

When I heard about Blogcritics, I immediately wanted to be part of the “sinister cabal of superior writers.” Thanks to Eric, for giving me a slot on the team roster!

Blogcritics really is an amazing community of writers, and I highly recommend adding it to your reading list, if you haven’t checked it out.

3. Len and Nora from Jawbone Radio. Back in my podcasting days, I came across these guys, who do a great podcast right here in Cleveland that can probably be accurately called the longest running local podcast at this point.

Len is a fellow Star Wars fan, and they both share love for They Might Be Giants, Calvin and Hobbes, and other favorites of mine as well. Plus, Len let me sit in on the show one time. Perhaps we can do it again some time.

4. John Soeder’s Pop Music blog. Back when I was a young teenager, I would have great conversations at shows with longtime Plain Dealer rock reporter Jane Scott. Those of you that are here in Cleveland, know how amazing that is. And, if you went to shows, you probably had some of those same historical conversations with a walking piece of rock history.

John is one of several at The Plain Dealer that continue to write about rock and roll, and in addition to enjoying his writing, I’ve had some great conversations with John about Tom Petty albums, arena rock, and other stuff I can’t quite recall right now.

I’ve been reading his writing for the PD for quite a few years now, and I was thrilled when he got his own blog. Sometimes it feels like stalking, but John tells me that I’m an “engaged netizen.”

Works for me!

5. Heather @ I Am Fuel, You Are Friends. She loves Pearl Jam, Wilco, Paul Westerberg, and many other things that I love as well. I can’t recall when I first came across her blog, but she’s always up to something cool, like posting an organized collection of all of the Pearl Jam Xmas Singles. You come across good people in the blogosphere, and Heather is definitely one of them.

6. Jefito and the crew at Popdose. Jefitoblog (R.I.P.) was my favorite daily surf, and one day it was gone, a victim of a server crash.

Out of its ashes eventually rose Popdose, a cool collective made up of Jefito, and many music bloggers that I was already reading via their respective music blogs. They combined efforts for a giant music blog extravagonzo known as Popdose. It rocks beyond words.

Check out the Bottom Feeders series for an introduction to one of many cool ongoing series that you’ll find at Popdose.

7. Burgo and his appropriately named blog called Burgo’s Blog. Burgo and I share quite a bit in common – we’re both named “Matthew Edward” for our first and middle names, and he lives in Australia. I don’t live in Australia. But we share lots in common musically, and the Burg-meister was one of the first folks to support this little blog.

8. TJ @ Viva La Mainstream. TJ was another early supporter of Addicted to Vinyl. I posted a blog-length response to his shot at the deluxe edition of the Gin Blossoms album New Miserable Experience. As it turns out, TJ is still in his teens, and hadn’t heard the album. Based on my….um, essay, TJ launched an extensive search to find the deluxe edition, which happens to be out of print. TJ’s blog is hot, by the way – I’m honored to be on his list of links!

TJ currently has one of the best summaries of an album that I’ve read so far this year with his comments on the latest Offspring CD:

Rise and Fall, Rage and Grace is a rarity in that it actually gets better the longer you listen to it. The challenge is having the patience and will to get through the subpar and flat-out awful. Since I admittedly lost interest before the album closed out (and only kept going for the good of the review), I can’t say that it’s necessarily worth the effort you’d need to put forth.

TJ is officially on board for Virgin Festival 2008, so we will be hanging for the first time. Yay!

9. Mel @ Life, Liberty, & Pursuit of Your Boyfriend. Mel is awesome, and I’ve already given her praise previously and very recently. After getting this blog to a point where it was starting to feel established, I began to network with fellow Cleveland bloggers. Melinda was one of the first to acknowledge me with something besides a middle-finger salute. “The Boyfriend Blog” is my favorite non-music related daily read.

And let’s not forget that she has an Ipod named Esteban.

10. Tara’s Foodie blog. It’s a little known fact among many of my friends, but I’m one of the rare guys that can actually cook. I came across Tara’s blog via Mel’s blogroll. One of these days, I’ll actually get around to cooking in the kitchen here at the house (I moved in in December, and still don’t have it set up the way I want it for cooking purposes.)

Check out Tara’s great blog, and prepare to be hungry after you see some of her pictures and read a few sentences. As it happens, Tara is a recovering metalhead, and a big Dream Theater fan. I never woulda guessed it, until she took me to task on a snarky comment I made about Dream Theater in this post!

The award guidelines were to pick seven of my favorites….but as a music fan, I had to pick my top ten……and even that was difficult!

Honorable Mention:

Taawd’s Thoughts – Todd is a fellow Clevelander, and a cool dude. We’ll get the entire Cleveland group together one of these days for a hang.

Pitriff – Not technically a blog, but my longtime musical comrade Chris Akin gave me my first shot at doing print interviews, and writing about music in his Cleveland based music paper Music’s Bottom Line (R.I.P.)

Thanks to that, I got my first chance to talk to nearly all of Damn Yankees – Tommy Shaw about his solo CD, Jack Blades about the new Night Ranger CD (at the time,) and Ted Nugent….and well, Ted did most of the talking on that one. There were numerous other highlights in a short period of time – we had fun!

In all of my good times and bad times, I’ve been happy to count Chris as one of my dearest friends.

Rabble-Rousin’ Since ’77 – Corey (friend and fellow Clevelander) might be even more of a sick music freak than I am. He’s certainly the only person I’ve met that will regularly do things like meet former Monkee Peter Tork, feel kinda crummy about the experience, and still get the autograph tattooed on his arm.

Now that I think about it, I think we might be related!

Ann Porter – Another early supporter of Addicted to Vinyl – she found this site via my Springsteen Agora post. Thanks for hanging around!

Stuck in the 80’s – If you love 80’s music like I do, you’ll love these guys. They do a great podcast that I came across via the Steve Hoffman Forums, and I am infinitely jealous that they got to interview my eternal crush Molly Ringwald.

Check out the above websites – I hope you enjoy them as much as I do. I am always on the lookout for reading/music/activities that creatively feed my always-hungry rarely satisfied alleged mind, and these sites help out, a lot!

On a musical note, David Gilmour’s Remember That Night (audio from the live DVD) concert recording, and the new studio album from Dan Baird and Homemade Sin provided the musical soundtrack I listened to while preparing this entry.

David Gilmour – Where We Start (live)