Get myself together
I've been a 'bedroom' songwriter since I was 11 years-old. I'm 41 now. So that's 30 years. Jeez.
Looking back, I think I've always been decent enough at the writing bit, but then absolutely terrible at self-promotion. Whether that's from fear of rejection, fear of derision, or just fear of people politely saying they don't really like what you do—something has always held me back from pursuing music production and songwriting as anything more than a hobby.
I've also spent a whole heap of time almost wilfully confusing myself and procrastinating about the 'right' way to put my music out there. Should I be sending out tapes (yes, I am that old), putting up a MySpace (again, sigh), doing Facebook... Twitter... Insta… Youtube... TikTok... should I just be doing sync music now? Should I even be writing songs at all, or just recording 20 second cat videos (note to self: maybe buy a cat)?
All of which is a long-winded way of saying I think I was putting up artificial barriers for myself, probably out of fear of failure.
I'm not 100% sure what the solution to all this is. But as of now, I’ve decided to pick a lane (or a couple of lanes) and stick to them for a concerted period of time. I've set up a sort of recurring schedule—hopefully nothing overly ambitious—as a way of focusing my brain on doing a thing and then moving on to the next thing and the next in a vaguely structured way.
The basic building blocks of the schedule, which runs on a 6-8 week cycle, are something like:
1 new single
1 x acoustic version of single [video]
1-2 x cover songs [video]
1-2 blog posts
As many social posts, interactions and pitches as my innate British reserve will allow
I suspect that I'll do most of these things fairly amateurishly, certainly to start with, but I figure I'll improve through regular repetition and by analysing what works and what doesn't.
In the end, I might not get anywhere with any of this. But I wanted to record my thoughts at the start—and indeed throughout the process—in case it's any help to anyone in a similar position.
And by way of a sign off... here’s a song I wrote for this year's February Album Writing Month. I'm not sure the lyrics are particularly relevant to what I've just written, but I decided to nicked the title anyway.