This album marks a personal milestone on my journey as a music creator for a number of reasons that I feel really good about.
The entire album was created from scratch in about three weeks thanks to my participation in the FAWM challenge (February Album Writing Month). I’ve been a regular of FAWM since 2008 and it’s played a huge role in my development as a songwriter.
Being dragged along by a raging, songwriting current for an entire month, every year for over a decade is going to have an effect. The effect is that I feel very, very confident in my songwriting abilities these days, which doesn’t mean I think I’m necessarily that good, but I know it’s pretty much what I’m best at.
More importantly I’m very satisfied with what I do and how I do it, so how good I am is not exactly the point anyway. The point for me is that I feel I can call myself a songwriter without feeling just a little bit like a fraud. It’s taken long enough to feel that good about it!
This year I wrote less songs during the challenge, but spent time perfecting the arrangements and production so I wouldn’t have to go back later to do any more work in order to finish the song. That isn’t the focus of FAWM (it’s the song that matters, not the demo), but seeing as my personal writing process involves the recording then this is the way it has to be for me.
Past FAWM challenges have seen me write and record some really good demos that I knew needed a little something extra doing to them and once the whirlwind moment of taking the spark of an idea to a demo that strangers can listen to is over, it has been very hard for me to go back and get the same magic going again to fully do justice to the original idea – hence I have many songs that may sound pretty well finished to many folks, but certainly not to me.
So this year I made the commitment to release whatever I posted this FAWM and so there were some things I wrote, but didn’t post because I only wanted to release songs that met a certain, personal standard. (I did not include the co-write I did, but hopefully that will feature on another record that I want to put out this year).
I kept true to my commitment and further to that, a second commitment to release it by the end of March while the songs were still fresh. The remixing process was pretty straightforward, but required an intense attention to reach the standard I set myself. It was imperative to get on with it as soon as FAWM had finished, so I could capitalize on the energy generated over the previous month… before it wore off!
So the mixes on the album are (in my opinion) somewhat superior to the demos I posted in February. If you’re so inclined you can listen to the lyric videos I posted on Youtube (the original, February demos) and see how they compare to the official release on Bandcamp.
I am very grateful to those that have shown their support by buying the record and providing valuable feedback throughout the writing and production process of this record.
And thank you for reading this far…
Remember Something Big is Coming – get ready for it because nothing can stop it… nothing!
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