Toxi: Hi!

Madison: Hello

Toxi: Thank you for joining me! I'm really excited to get the opportunity to interview you. I'm feeling a little nervous but glad either way.

Madison: [Clapping]

Toxi: Would you mind introducing yourself? I know some few things here and there, but for anybody who doesn't and is reading this, could you tell them a little about yourself?

Madison: Um hi I'm Madison and I like to contribute to the metal side of Genius as there's not much going on over there compared to the other genres.

Toxi: Sweet! And if you can rеmember, what got you into Genius in thе first place?

Madison: The release of the Gloryhammer song "Fly Away"
I wanted lyrics and the song didn't have them released at the time

Toxi: Ah, yes. The classic do-it-yourself mindset—that's what I love about Genius!

You mentioned Gloryhammer. I'm a little curious about your favorite artists and bands. Or if favorites are too hard, which do you find yourself listening to most? Even any outside of the metal scene?

Madison: Well I really like Gloryhammer, Planeswalker, Blind Guardian, Nightwish, and Rhapsody. Outside of metal I rather like Emeline.

Toxi: Those are some really cool choices! I'd like to zoom out a bit. Does anything catch your eye outside of music? What kind of activities do you like to do? I get the impression from your annotations that you're somewhat of a book person, but I figured it's good to ask directly.

Madison: I'm a huge nerd so I love scifi stuff. I do indeed love to read a lot of scifi and fantasy stuff which is definitely reflected in the music I listen to/work on.
Toxi: Love it!! Could you name some of the books you're reading now, or some of your favorite reads?

Madison: I'm currently reading Invasion by J. Robert King, it's the first book in Magic: The Gathering's Invasion block, and the 13th book in the Weatherlight Saga.
Toxi: Oooohh :O
I've always wanted to get into Magic The Gathering—here I am finding out that they even have books for it in the first place, haha

Madison: There's like 80 of them, not including the comics, or the e-novellas, or just the other story stuff Magic posts

Toxi: I see! I'll be sure to look into the series after this is all wrapped up ^_^
In the meantime… You mentioned that metal doesn't see a lot of care on Genius as other genres do. That was mainly what I was thinking about, because I've seen how much you've done for the growing Metal Genius community. For starters, how did you find yourself wanting to take the initiative for the Metal Genius revamp?
Especially putting together a guide yourself for how to transcribe metal on-site, that felt especially remarkable to me.

Madison: I was bored ahahha. Nah but fr I see communities on Genius and I wanted to be a part of one.

Toxi: Have you any comments on how Metal Genius looked vaguely before you came along? I admit that I don't know that much about Metal Genius myself. So since we're here, I might as well.

Madison: Not really it's still pretty much the same, just a bunch of release calendars.

Toxi: Gotcha!

Looks like you contribute a lot to Gloryhammer, Trans-Siberian Orchestra, Sozos Michael, etc. These are some really cool acts. If you can remember, how did you get into these artists, or metal in general?

Madison: Ummm largely the Last.fm discord server but also through the genre playlists that are on YouTube Music. I rather liked the "Swords & Sorcery" and "Symphonic Shredding" ones.

Toxi: To clarify, these are names of YouTube Music playlists?

Madison: Yeah one sec I'll get you the links
[Links to the "Swords & Sorcery" and "Symphonic Shredding" playlists on YouTube Music]

Damn they deprecated the symphonic metal one wtf
Not cool YouTube

Toxi: I read that and felt a little sad as well 😕

Madison: The power metal one is still fine, it just means they won't rotate new songs into the symphonic playlist
Regardless of that they're still a great place to start
Spotify has something similar, however they're for Spotify's made up subgenres. Like "Italian power metal" which, although is a thing, doesn't really sound distinct from normal European power metal

Toxi: I know Spotify to have some… "trouble," let's say, with genres that seemingly only exist on Spotify, and I guess that's true with metal too haha

Madison: [Links to Every Noise at Once]

Toxi: I love Every Noise at Once! Though I think it's a really cool project, I never really used it in depth to discover more music
Anyhow... wanna know a cool statistic?

Madison: Sure

Toxi: At this point in time, you've been an Editor on Genius for around three months. Time flies quick on this site! And you've already done a lot on the website in that amount of time. Could you tell me a little about how it's felt to be an Editor on Genius, especially representing a community like Metal Genius?

Madison: Umm well idk if I've really done that much as an editor outside of my own work. I don't usually reject some of the annotations I come across because they're either not wrong or just need some work that I'm not in the mood to do at the time of discovery. I have marked a fair amount of lyrics complete and edited them because tons of these pages are from pressburg and have gone formatless for years.

Toxi: +1 to Madison and +0 to pressburg.
If anybody's out there reading this that wants to eventually work towards becoming an Editor themselves, do you have any pieces of advice for them?
Madison: Write good 👍👍👍 don't plagiarise 👍👍👍 info-dump 👍👍👍 cite your sources 👍👍👍

Toxi: Infodumping is key—don't feel afraid to let the people know!
Circling back to music once more; do you currently own any physical versions of music (vinyl, cassette, CD, etc.)?

Madison: Yeah I've got CDs and cassettes
I'd love to have like all my favourite albums on CD but they're all in Euros 😭

Toxi: Really cool! The idea of collecting albums and stuff like that has always interested me but I've just not had the means

Madison: Bandcamp is pretty nice I love how the artist gets most of the profit and I get a digital copy in addition to the physical one.

Toxi: Not sure if I'm wording this right, but do you get physicals from Bandcamp often?

Madison: Only 3 at this point because again, the Euro thing.

Toxi: Ah, makes sense makes sense
I remember you mentioning being to a few concerts. I wanna know a bit about that. Did any of them stand out to you?

Madison: I loved the Gloryhammer one I went to. It was a small venue but it was super cool.

Toxi: Do you remember what they played there?

Madison: Yeah one sec

[Sends the setlist to the concert in question]

Toxi: Ooh, I feel super jealous you got to see those songs live >:O

Madison: They were pretty rad fr I knew all the words 😊

Toxi: Sounds sweet. This question is a little out there, but if you could get an autograph from anybody in the world, living or dead, real or fictional, who would it be?

Madison: Probably the vocalist of Gloryhammer, Sozos Michael, because he's pretty talented and a cool guy.

Toxi: That's all of the questions. I really had fun talking with you, thanks for setting aside some time for my antics ^_^
Do you have anything else?

Madison: Nope I think that's all

Toxi: Awesome. Then have a fabulous day, or night now I think!