Hello everyone and Happy New Year.

Kirk here with an update about season eight of Strong Songs, along with some exciting changes

coming to the show to the Strong Songs Patreon and some other announcements about the upcoming year.

First of all, Strong Songs Season 8 will be kicking off in the main feed on Friday, January

16th.

Season 8, which also corresponds with the eighth year of Strong Songs, is going to be the first

second helpings season that I've made, and that means that I'll be returning to artists

and bands that I covered in the early years, and I'll be giving them a second

episode. It's going to kick off with an episode on Rosanna by Toto, an amazing song, and it

seemed only fitting to start the season with that song, because the very first episode of

Strong Songs was about Toto. It was about their song, Africa. In 2026, I will also shift to releasing episodes monthly

instead of bi-weekly. For the past few years, I have been making strong songs seasonally,

which has meant some pretty lengthy downtime in between seasons, like the downtime we are just

coming to the end of. And as it turned out, I was making 10, 11 episodes per year,

along with bonuses. And I realized, well, I could just shift to releasing episodes once a month. I'd release the same number of episodes, and there wouldn't be any downtime. So that's what I'm going to do. New episodes are going to hit on the third Friday of each month for the entire year. And then when it's time for season nine, I'll just keep going. I mean, I might take

December off or something. So I want to have a more regular cadence, even if it's a little bit

less frequent. Now, as you probably know, Strong Songs is on Patreon, and listener support is

really the only way that I make money on this show, this show that I spend so much time on that

has become such a major part of my life. It really only

exists thanks to the support of listeners. So before I get into all the new stuff that I'm doing

on Patreon, and there is some new stuff, I just want to say for starters, I'm having a sale

for the month of January. You can sign up for the Patreon for the $5 quarter note tier, which

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