When I decided to start taking this project seriously, I realised there were three mountains to climb, recording and writing, marketing and playing live. I had begun climbing the mountain of marketing whilst the album was still taking shape; rejoining social media for the first time since 2012, building a website, thinking about branding and logo design and artwork. But when I had the first single back, Jon McMullen had done an incredible job and it sounded so much better than I'd expected, and I was left with a much better product than I thought I was going to have.
Now that I had a song mastered to this level, and that this is the standard for the music, I felt that I needed to give this project the best possible chance of being heard. If nobody likes it, then that is fine, but if no one hears it and so can’t make a judgement on it, it felt like... a waste? A waste of a lot of effort and a lot of care and emotion.
So, I have spent a lot of time planning, refining and working on marketing. This has not come naturally to me; I am not really someone that thinks about how to sell things to people and it has been a steep learning curve. For each part of this project, I have tried to do things conscientiously and with care. For each mixing pass of the music, for each take, for each lyric I tried to never let myself say ‘ah that will do’ and always go back if it wasn’t right, until there was nothing left that was wrong.
Now I am trying to apply the same diligence to marketing, making sure Screaming Foxes feels like it has a vibe and a space that it occupies. So, with the single out on the 30th of October (roughly two months away), I am in the midst of creating my first attempts at content, polishing the website, creating a sign up list, organising blogs and reviewers to send to, sorting out a PR company to help with promotion either through radio, press or Spotify playlist plugging and just trying to do a good job of establishing myself as an artist.
It feels speculative, working hard to be selling something that you don’t know if there is a market for, but I want to share what I have made. And this is what it takes to do that.
Back to topHey, this is my first of these. I thought it would be cool to… share how I have been thinking and what has been happening while I have been writing these songs. Things are coming together on the marketing side, and I guess I can’t really put this off any longer. I am not sure why I have been putting it off, I journal regularly and this is, in essence, the same thing. But I think it’s because, if I am honest, I didn’t find making this album and these songs that much fun really and it isn’t something I look back on fondly. It felt like a purge, like a stream of consciousness or a tearful release during therapy. Needed or cathartic maybe, but not comfortable.
Playing Games was the first song that I wrote, and I wrote and rewrote it 37 times. I had the first two thirds, cannibalised from a song from an old band and then had this outro with these picked chords that I really loved, with these lyrics that weren’t really about anything but just came out in the moment. Then the first part of the song felt wrong. Rushed and… cold and flat. Especially compared to the more honest, last part of the song.
I think the difference was that the outro sounded like how I felt, it didn’t sound like what I wanted to sound like. And even though it maybe wasn’t as cool as I wanted to be, it was real and there was a little spark in that. I kept working on that, over and over, until the outro had been binned and nothing of the original song remained, and I had 37 versions of the songs on my Google Drive. I realised eventually that what I was trying to say, is that I had just been wasting my time, playing games with people that don’t go anywhere, and that it felt great to… not be doing that anymore. Sad to have done it, but relief to be free from it. To have the space and time to be bored and peaceful. Hence the lyrics.
Singing it after this, tracking it, recording it, mixing it, getting the movement of it right, just came together. This was the hardest I had ever worked on a song, and it showed. It had a feeling and ambience, and it wasn’t particularly cool, at least to my ears, but at least it was honest and that felt like it was worth something. Maybe no one ever hears it, but it felt good to both refine something until it lands and to start to be properly honest through music.
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