This post is going to be a bit of a weird one. So bear with me… Also it’s winter and cold, so just a featured photo of me looking unimpressed with the weather after driving to the music studio. Ha.

I’ll start off by saying that right now going back to when I wrote my first piece… I have about 150 completed songs (And maybe another 100 fairly fleshed out song ideas). People are often surprised by these numbers when they ask me how much original material I have written but there are numerous reasons for why I would essentially seem to be ‘hoarding’ songs in this way. A track is composed of lyrics, vocal melody and instrumental pieces. All of these components are variable and likely to change over time; every year that goes by, one picks up new skills and techniques but maybe even more significantly, a person amasses so many new experiences their life. These could be either personal or just observed from the world around them.

Where I’m going with this line of thought basically is… A song is a snapshot in time. If you hear a song you used to love listening to when you were younger or that you heard at a specific occasion, it can sort of transport you back into that ‘world’. Maybe a really great song that you hear for the first time can do the opposite and make you look forward to possibilities in the future. Either way, how a song shapes up is heavily dependent on when and where it was completed. It is unique to that moment in time and if it had been finished any later or earlier, it might not have turned out as the same song. I’m becoming a bit philosophical here in general, but all of this rambling sets up the specific point I am ‘trying’ to explain…

As I said previously in my first blog post (Feel free to check back if you want ;)); for me personally, creating music feels a bit like a form of therapy, stress release or way to process life. Everyone needs something that does this for them. If not music; people choose all kinds of different avenues to ‘free’ themselves, for some it could be regular exercise, sport, gaming, reading, films, poetry or even just by being more outward with their emotions in general. On a side note, I also do other hobbies because sometimes even I need to separate my mind from thinking about music… !

The reason I have so many songs is because my experiences are continuous, so why would the desire to write stop? If someone likes walking, it would be strange if they always did the same routes but then again if some people like the idea of that, then that’s okay too. < or *Insert a better analogy* (I’m pretty bad at analogies). I know there are other artists who have 100’s if not 1000’s of songs created across their entire career, but generally we only hear a small fraction of their life’s work. This is at least until posthumous album collection things are released… But anyway, I’m not saying it would be good if everything is released because obviously some songs just aren’t as good as others. It’s a skill in itself to refine the best work from a bulky collection of ideas down into something of really high quality rather than quantity. This skill probably takes the longest for artists to figure out, generally having an outside opinion is good because ultimately the artist themselves can’t ever be fully objective. If the balance can be found where artist; audience and label are all fully happy, then great but this takes time to establish I think.

Longest blog yet, so I must conclude. I’m the kind of person who takes 20 pictures of the same thing on holiday because I want the perfect shot, maybe this is my mindset with music. I just want to keep writing and pushing my skills and creativity. I actually kind of think every song is perfect, because it’s the best I could do at the time and I wouldn’t change the result. A song from my past is unique and ‘current me’ wouldn’t be able to write the same song in the present, so that version of myself could do something that I can’t now. Which… Sort of makes the older songs perfect in their own way. This is okay though because in the present I have a lot of new and different things to offer to song writing than I could previously, so this is all a clumsy and over indulgent way of saying… I just want to keep writing and releasing music that’s relevant to my current skills, experiences and thoughts. Into the collection they go. (With some of them being selected every now and again for each Album/EP project of course). If a time/times come when I don’t feel like being as prolific; that’s fine as well, I can take a break and come back to it later.