As I willingly step up to the hamster wheel once more and prepare to launch myself into another album release cycle, it’s very tempting to only look forward. After all, I have spent the last year or so of my life hearing about and preparing for ‘the next chapter’, ‘the step up’, the ‘push outside the box’, all of which requires a large degree of forward-planning and forward-thinking. The last couple of months specifically have been ruled by pencilled dates and future deadlines that very quickly catch up with the present, release plans, further revised release plans, social media calendars and final sign-offs for the sounds and designs that will chase me around for the next year or two or more. It has been the management of expectations, the setting of goals and the building of the scaffolding on which I now must climb. For the sake of full transparency, in my experience being a musician is 20% rock and roll, 80% admin.
And then before that, it was the writing. I could gloss over that period and say that I spent every single one of those nights pouring over my guitar and notepad in a state of unadulterated creative joy and inspiration. That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy the process of creating these new songs, because I did, very much, but so often it was tempered by the need to muffle the little, nagging voice reminding me that these songs needed to achieve something, and be something. What would people think of this melody? Would they like these songs as much as the last album? Did it sound too much like something I’d written before, or too different? How would I link all these songs together into something cohesive? Could this really be enough for the third album? Am I really prepared to do this all again?
The answer is yes, of course I am, because there’s the even quieter voice that dares to hope that this album will be ‘it’ – the one that takes off and propels the road-weary artist into stardom (or at least into a semi-detatched two bed and mortgage). I think it’s important to enter a new cycle with faith in both yourself and the people around you, or you’ll never enter it at all. You nurture these songs as precious, fragile things, filling them with meaning and intention and holding them so tightly for so long that it becomes incredibly hard to let them go. You spend days and weeks agonising over the tiniest details in their lyrics and their production, and for good reason – once they’re out there, they’re gone from your control. That’s the funny thing about releasing music. The minute you press go and it’s released into the wild, whether that’s on stage in front of an audience or somewhere in the digital sphere, a song is no longer yours anyway. All that work is offered up on a plate, to be sampled and savoured, or perhaps spat back out again. Those songs, filled with your deepest regrets, joys and personal experiences, are free to take on a new life in new minds. Their meanings change, they shape-shift, their reflect differently from every angle, and people make of them whatever they will. You can make a watertight plan and type in a destination, but a released album becomes a living, breathing, moving thing that finds a path and freewheels, while you become the passenger. I think this has to be the most beautiful and most nerve-wracking thing about the whole process.
So, I’ve been looking forward to this moment in so many ways, with both hope and trepidation, for such a long time now. And, as I stand here at the edge of that ‘next chapter’ and ready to release my first single ‘Matches’ into the world, I really want to do things a little differently this time. I want to commit to looking back from time time at all the things that have been done to get to this point, instead of getting completely consumed by what comes next, as is so easily done once the wheels begin to turn. I want to make sure I take a moment to turn around and take note of what it took to get here, rather than always keeping my eyes on the next climb ahead. It might be important to keep moving the goal posts, but it only has emotional value if you remember that they’ve been moved.
With this in mind, I’m hoping to write a little more regularly on this blog (I know, I know, this is a promise I’ve tried and failed to keep before), particularly about the work and thought process behind each song and how it came to have the shape it now does. I suppose I should start with ‘Matches’, but perhaps that can wait for another post. For now, I just wanted to put this feeling in writing, mainly to document it for myself, but also in case other creatives can sympathise with something I have expressed. Being a musician and offering up the innermost corners of my heart to other is one of the greatest, most frightening and most rewarding privileges I could ever ask for and I am so incredibly grateful to be on this journey with you all. Wherever you are on your own climb, I hope we can all take a second to enjoy the view.