Last October I wrote on this blog for the first time in 8 years.  I had great plans. I was going to post multiple times a week and build up a large enthusiastic audience for this blog.  I couldn’t have been more mistaken.  (Which is the longer title for the song that is linked below.)

I was going to direct my blogging energies towards music.  As pretty much anyone who is likely to encounter this post will be aware, I’ve been writing songs for a while.  It’s something I enjoy doing.  Occasionally I’d trot out one or another of the songs I’ve written and play them for friends.  On rare occasions I’d get in front of crowds – usually people who were participating in a choir or singing workshop  that I was also participating in.  While I had fantasies of someone, anyone, happening upon one of my songs and deciding to do something with it to make it successful.  I had little reason to imaging that would happen, but it was a pleasant diversion.

Last year I approached John Vallins, an actual musician of my acquaintance, to produce a couple of my songs.  The result was two well produced recordings that made those two songs sound better than they had any right to.  The two songs were “I’ll Be Dead Before it Happens”, which was featured in my post of last October, and “The Best” which hasn’t featured in this blog yet.  That’s because this is the first time I’ve approached this page since last October.  My great plans have thus far come to nothing.
Except…

Commissioning a professional producer to work on a song is expensive so I decided to try a different path. I’ve thrown myself into the quagmire of attempting to produce my own songs on my computer.  It’s something I knew almost nothing about last October.  Now I know a bit more than I did back then, but the sum of my knowledge is still very small.  However, I’ve been hard at work.  I’m learning heaps and little by little getting better at it.

Since October I’ve used the tools I’ve been able to find, and occasionally purchase, to produce a number of songs.  Initially I’d publish the finished products on BandCamp where they sit alongside “The Best” and “I’ll Be Dead Before That Happens”.  Currently there are 14 songs on BandCamp, 12 of which I’ve produced myself.  So those songs exist in the world and are no longer entirely contained in my head and on my iPad.

Recently, faced with the fact that putting the songs on BandCamp has not lead to people discovering the songs (on BandCamp there have been exactly 1000 listens as of today – that comes to an average of 71.4 listens per song) I decided I’d broaden my horizons.  I’ve now loaded all the songs onto SoundCloud as well.  And I’ve made lyric videos of two of the songs and put them on YouTube.  I have no idea if doing all that will mean finding new listeners, but I figure it’s worth a shot.

Here is one of the lyric videos.  They aren’t elaborate or particularly artistic.  At this point they are just a way to put the songs on a difference platform.  One’s that’s visual.  Who knows, it might help.

I’ve got a lot to talk about on this music blog.  How am I doing this?  Why does it take so long? Why don’t I just put my feet up and enjoy my retirement?

I still have big plans.  I don’t know how I’m going to get anyone to read my blog, but you never know.  Maybe someone will run into my musing, notice that virtually every post will contain a link to a song, listen to one of them and suddenly the world will discover my music.

It’s a nice fantasy.  It’s mildly distracting.

Perhaps in my next post I’ll tell you a bit about Mistaken.  “I’ll Be Dead Before It Happens” was a satyrical climate change song.  This one is also climate change adjacent.  But it’s a bit more subtle.

Early in 2021, when I was first experimenting with GarageBand, I recorded a version of this song. It was a terrible recording. My singing was never close to the note I intended and it didn’t even maintain a consistent tempo. The song wasn’t ready to be recorded and I didn’t know enough to do it justice.

Most of the lyrics have been re-written. Hopefully improved. I’m not sure why but the production took a very long time to complete, and even now I think I should re-do the vocals and change the arrangement. But I think that after every song so I’ve learned not to take it too seriously.

I wrote the song after getting an unfortunate diagnosis and some of what that meant.