“My forthcoming ‘discarded ideas’ album, Bits and Bobs, is now being mixed and mastered. I’ll need some artwork and then there is the usual lead-in time to releasing on Spotify and Apple Music etc., but I can see this album coming out in February or March. Exciting!
Other plans for 2021 include a video for ‘Only Spicks and specks; Only Bits and Bobs’ (track on my 2020 album, Something for Everyone). It just needs Covid-19 restrictions to ease enough for it to be made. Also, in the first half of this year, I plan to release a small package of tracks I recorded before Something For Nothing, which have been re-mixed and mastered. I will also be releasing an out-and-out summer single, perhaps in early June.
Something else I intend to do in 2021 is start recording a new album. I gathered all the ideas I’ve had so far and I found I have three strong ones and a couple of others. Given an album is typically 10 tracks, this is already good progress. There may be other ideas lurking in various apps.
Two of the ideas are based around mod/punk guitar riffs, so that may be a theme for the next album. I think I’d like a more uniform approach to the style of the next album (as opposed to the eclecticism of Something for Everyone), but maybe with one or two exceptions. An idea I have is to use drum machines or rhythm loops exclusively. So spikey rhythm guitar and non-natural drums may be my style for this next phase of my artistic journey. But I also want to see if I can innovate how drum machines are used in music-making with a couple of ideas I have.
When this next album can come out, I don’t know. It probably won’t take 2 1/2 years to write and, like Something for Everyone did. The first time you do something is usually the slowest and I think I will be significantly faster the second time. I won’t need to take singing lessons from scratch, but I may want to get some help and input from Mags ahead of recording the vocals … if that works for her. So this album may come out in 2022. We’ll see.
I have other plans that stretch beyond 2021, such as professionally releasing everything that is listenable from my entire back catalogue of music, so that there is a comprehensive record of my music on major music platforms. This is in excess of 60 tracks, some as part of EPs or albums and others as singles. So this is not a quick and easy task, especially as it is likely to involve remastering (the mixes are lost) and presenting much of it with professional artwork and maybe videos. But, for me, this is part of facilitating a legacy for as long as what I release on major global platforms remains widely available.