One Year of Pagan Song

Happy birthday to our blog! In February of 2019, the Crow Women started this online enterprise: our website Pagan Song. It seemed like the next logical step in our growth as a pagan band. What an adventure this has been!

In the 1990s we sang for ourselves and at regional pagan festivals. In the 2000s we put out our first album, Crow Goddess, which is mostly covers of our favorite pagan chants plus a few originals. We thought of it as a service; sharing chants we loved. In the 2010s we produced two albums of all original pagan music, and started to see ourselves as kinda-sorta professional musicians. Now, in the 2020s we are here, going strong in the online arena, bringing to you the Pagan Song website and blog.

The structure emerges

We knew we’d be sharing the stories behind the songs on our albums. But we wanted this website to be more than a band promotion site. We wanted it to be useful. We thought it would be amazing to become a popular center for information on pagan music and lifestyle, a key resource for the broader pagan community. A resource for you!

We mined what we know. A structure emerged from our passions, and those passions turned into the categories of our website. The menus you see on the site reflect this structure.

• Blog. With thirteen different authors, our posts have a lot of variety!
• Our 3 albums, Crow Goddess, Crow Magic and Seasons. These pages help you learn our songs and teach them to others. We want it to be easy to use our music in your magical work and rituals.Each and every song track has its own page, with
  • credits
  • lyrics
  • a YouTube video so you can hear the song
  • a list of blog posts that reference that song, to spark your ideas for using it
• Witchy wisdom. With such a diverse group of blogwitches, we have a real depth of information to share. Because our topic pages are fed from our blog, they are always expanding with new information.
  • Magic How-to. Many of these posts provide ritual instructions drawn from our own magical practice
    • The Magic of the Five Elements
    • Healing Magic
    • Goddess Magic
    • Spellwork
  • Music How-toWe’re a pagan band, and have lots to share about the nuts and bolts of music.
    • Singing Tips
    • Playing Instruments Tips
    • Songwriting Tips
    • Rehearsal Tips
    • Recording Tips
  • Recipes and CraftsWe strive to live a magical life in all we do, including making wonderful mead and delicious recipes; fun ritual crafts and sacred altars. These posts share the step-by-step instructions.
    • Mead Making
    • Food for the Feast
    • Arts & Crafts projects
    • Altars and Sacred Spaces
  • Healthy Group Dynamics Being a women’s Goddess worship circle and being a band both require lots of emotional intelligence. This section of our website contains some of our insights in that arena.
• Pagan Sabbats We have a page for each of the 8 Sabbats, with a little information about the holiday, links to all our songs for the holiday, a Spotify playlist of music by various artists for the holiday, and a display of the blog posts we’ve written that focus on the holiday. The posts include ritual outlines, song suggestions, recipes, and other musings.
• Rites of Passage This theme on our website is about the transition times of our lives and the ceremonies that honor them. And the music to sing in each rite of passage, of course!

Feedback time!

We’ve been going at this for a year, and have racked up 88 blog posts across all the above categories. What do you think? It’s you we’re writing for, and we want to know whether we’re on the right track. So, we’re going to invite you to answer four questions. Here’s the first.

Reader question 1

Which categories of posts do you enjoy the most?

Highlights of Pagan Song

We have many, many excellent posts. One I particularly liked putting together was the article celebrating the release of our third album, Seasons. The post is titled Seasons: A Pagan Journey Around the Wheel, which is the full name of the album. I included quotes from everyone in the band about what it was like to create the CD. That album sure was a lot of work to birth into the world. Looking over that post from May, 2019, I can also see that I’ve come a long way in my technical skills as a blogger.

Which posts are most popular with our readers? Our readership has grown steadily, so the most recents posts are also the ones with the most hits. Also, if a post catches someone’s fancy and they share it in a Facebook group or elsewhere online, we get a LOT more traffic. (Please share our posts, pretty please!!!) So, take those biases into account. Nevertheless, here are a dozen of our most popular blog posts from the past 12 months:

• Chants for the Lammas Feast
• Calling the Element of Earth: A Ritual
• A Sex Goddess Ritual Using Recorded Music
• Astrology for Imbolc, 2020
• Chants for Winter Solstice rituals
• Ritual to Celebrate the Crone: Ending Menopause
• Crow Women Initiation Rituals
• Sexy Beltane Potion
• Imbolc: Day of Beginnings
• Samhain Ritual for Samhain Night
• Party Games for Pagans: Fill in the Blank
• Create a Handfasting Wedding

Reader question 2

Did you have any favorite blog posts?

Functions

In the beginning, there was the blog. Then, every few months, I, our Goddess of the Website, would get a burst of enthusiasm and experiment with new functions. I developed all the category pages I mentioned earlier in this post. I linked us to our music sales pages on CDBaby. I added a subscription widget so readers can be informed by email whenever a new blog post comes out. I signed us up in the Amazon Associate program so we could earn some money from readers’ qualifying purchases. I figured out how to make those grids so you can see all the posts relevant to a topic gathered together. All very interesting, all very time consuming work.

There’s a lot more that could be done to make this site a real pleasure to visit. It would be nice if the thing could earn its keep, too. Got any ideas?

Reader question 3

What improvements should we make to this site?

That existential question: To be or not to be?

This website and blog is a labor of love. But, it is a lot of work, and so far, its costs are greater than the income it produces. We have plenty more to say, that’s not the problem. But should we say it? Is anyone listening? We get very few comments from readers. Do you think Pagan Song is of value? Does it have the potential to become beloved of the pagan community here on Mama Gaia in the 2020s? We’d be interested in your perspective.

Reader question 4

Should we keep this website going?

So, dear reader, those are our 4 questions. We would be delighted if you would give us your feedback on one or more of our questions, either in the comments section below, or by commenting or messaging us on our Facebook page. Again, here is the list:

1. Which categories of posts do you enjoy the most?
2. Did you have any favorite blog posts?
3. What improvements should we make to this site?
4. Should we keep this website going?

On this first birthday of our baby, the Pagan Song website, I want to offer heartfelt thanks to all of our bloggers, to our readers, and to the diverse and merry band of pagans who have created the genre we call pagan music. I’d also like to thank the gurus at the Albuquerque WordPress Workalong meetup, who have pulled me out of the HTML gutter many times. And, most of all, I thank the Goddess and the Old Gods for the inspiration they have given to us as singers, songwriters and blogwitches.

Here’s to Year Two!

lead photo of birthday candle by Skyla Design on Unsplash

For more information about the Crow Women pagan choir, and access to all the blog posts by Alane and the other 9 crowsingers who have written for Pagan Song, you can visit the Crow Women author page here on Pagan Song.

Please subscribe to the Pagan Song blog, to receive our blog post each week. Don’t miss any of the musical magic!

Visit our homepage to see the full list of the musicians who write for the Pagan Song blog.

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